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From Churchill to Vietnam: protests that changed the world
With the police about to be given broader powers to tackle disruptive events, the right to protest is in the spotlight. Timothy Garton Ash and Katrina Navickas join Danny Bird to discuss the history of popular demonstrations
Danny Bird: What is a protest? What distinguishes it from a riot or a revolution? Katrina Navickas: A protest is often defined by law, making it a fluid and changeable term. In England and Wales, its meaning has evolved over time. The earliest legal definition dates to the 1714 Riot Act, which distinguished a riot from other forms of protest. The modern idea of a demonstration emerged in the 19th century alongside the rise of democratic movements. Protest came to mean people gathering publicly to make collective claims – a reflection of the growing concept of ‘the people’ and their role in politics. However, what counts as a protest still depends on context: the country, the circumstances and the legal boundaries of what is permitted in public spaces. Timothy Garton Ash: Historically, revolution was associated with violence, but modern protest is defined by nonviolent action. Think of Gandhi in India, the Civil Rights movement in the US, or People Power in the Philippines [in 1986, resulting in the overthrow of the Marcos regime]. The revolutionary events of 1989 in eastern Europe were particularly notable because they brought together nonviolence and revolution for the first time. In essence, protest is about people power – collective, peaceful demonstration as a means of change. What makes a protest ultimately successful? Is it timing, tactics, leadership or something peculiar to a moment in history? TGA: In the book I co-edited with Adam Roberts, Civil Resistance and Power Politics (OUP, 2009), we examined 18 cases over a century, from Gandhi to the more recent ‘colour revolutions’ in former Soviet and Yugoslav republics. One point is clear: protest alone is never enough. It requires favourable internal and external conditions to succeed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WHA0173278webready-6200492-e1767782763339.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a large crowd of people, standing together in white robes" title="Mahātmā Gandhi – shown on a peace march in 1947 during the partition of India – used nonviolent resistance to campaign for Indian independence and the end of British rule (Image by Topfoto)" /> For example, the 1989 revolutions succeeded where many Arab Spring protests did not because their surrounding circumstances were vastly different. Successful movements also have a clear strategy and they’re not merely expressions of anger or moral outrage. Effective protest involves understanding how to influence and divide those in power. Read more | The violent history of student protest KN: I often refer to the idea of critical mass, which is the point a movement gains enough public support to create real momentum. That usually depends on an ideological or belief shift, as well as favourable conditions. Successful protests often arise when the state is weakened – for instance, after wars or during major economic crises – creating opportunities to mobilise support. At such times, the forces of law and order may also be less capable of suppressing dissent. Even the strongest movement needs both structural openings and a sense among people that success is possible. Why does protest continue to make societies uneasy even in countries that pride themselves on free expression? KN: In Britain’s case, particularly in England and Wales, there was no statutory right to assembly or free speech until the Human Rights Act of 1998. Until then, the right to protest was effectively permissive rather than guaranteed. Throughout the 20th century, much of the legislation was designed to manage the far right and other regressive forces, which created tensions around freedom of speech and assembly. A key example came in 1936, with debates over whether Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists should be allowed to march. Questions arose over who could prevent such meetings, particularly those held in private venues, and whether police had the authority to intervene based on what was said. These tensions persist today: the balance between protecting free expression and preventing disorder remains delicate. TGA: Even in the freest societies, freedom is never unlimited. The freedoms of speech and assembly are constrained; if they were not, we would encounter philosopher Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, where unlimited tolerance can ultimately destroy tolerance itself by empowering the enemies of democracy. In authoritarian regimes, the issue is simpler: governments fear protest because it allows people to speak and find their voice. The pivotal moment is breaking that barrier of fear. For instance, in autumn 1989 in Leipzig, two friends attended a demonstration against the East German regime. As they walked, more people joined at each street corner… 10, 12, 200, then 1,000. This ‘cascade effect’ demonstrates how critical mass can overcome fear, a prospect that terrifies authoritarian rulers: consider Romanian president Nicolae Ceaușescu’s facial expression when he realised that the crowd was openly booing him on 21 December 1989. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-2220408825webready-194c494-e1767783458422.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a group of people leaning over a large number of lit candles on the floor" title="A candlelit mass protest in Leipzig in November 1989. The Monday Demonstrations, as these nonviolent gatherings were known, played a crucial role in ending the rule of communism in East Germany (Image by Getty Images)" /> How fair is it to say Britain’s history is one of evolution rather than revolution? KN: I often blame the Victorians for the myth of steady, moderate progress. The story of peaceful reform in Britain ignored harsh realities faced elsewhere. For a long time, for instance, Ireland was treated as a testing ground for extreme policing, public order measures and restrictions on constitutional rights. Even within Britain itself, progress was rarely smooth. TGA: Protest always involves risk – putting your body in situations where you might be attacked or, in extreme cases, killed. Sometimes, violence from the state backfires, galvanising wider support. The Tolpuddle Martyrs and, in Ireland, the Bloody Sunday massacres both illustrate this. How has protest been legislated and policed throughout history? KN: In Britain, general public order legislation arrived relatively late. Historically, most laws targeted specific political or social movements rather than applying broadly. In the 19th century, measures focused on the Chartists, trade unions or suffragettes. Even in the 20th century, legislation was often aimed at particular crises: the 1936 laws addressed fascist and communist unrest in the East End of London, while measures in 1986 targeted striking miners or football hooligans. Recent legislation, including that of 2022–23, is broader in scope, but it still arises in reaction to specific groups dominating public attention – for example environmental and black rights movements. This reactive approach represents a continuity throughout British history. TGA: Authoritarian governments can invent almost any justification to suppress protest. In democracies, the situation depends on whether constitutional protections exist. In the US, the First Amendment protects free speech; in Germany, experience with two dictatorships has led to clear constitutional guarantees of assembly. The UK has no written constitution. Over the past 30 years, piecemeal legislation, often poorly drafted and confusing, has slowly restricted protest. How do the spaces in which protest occurs help to shape it? KN: All protest is, at its core, a claim to public space. Demonstrations are associated with squares, streets and civic areas – town halls, county halls and other symbolic sites. Protesters assert their presence as ‘the public’ within these spaces, often choosing locations of national significance such as Trafalgar Square, built between the 1820s and 1840s and long regarded as Britain’s foremost public space. Throughout history, protesters have deliberately occupied symbolic sites to challenge authority or reshape public narratives. In London, battles over access to Hyde Park were especially significant. Although political gatherings were banned there because it was a royal park, the Reform League’s demonstrations of the 1860s, in which supporters tore down fences to enter, forced change. Speaker’s Corner emerged from this as a legal compromise established by the 1872 Parks Regulation Act, designating a specific area where people could speak freely without permission. Even modern tactics, such as ‘locking on’, have historical roots: suffragettes chained themselves to the gates of Downing Street to demand visibility and access. From the 18th century to the present day, controlling the geography of protest has remained central to how the state manages dissent. Read more | Female activism: 10 remarkable protests from around the world TGA: Protests are also a form of political theatre, and public squares are their grand stages. Consider Tiananmen Square, the focal point of the Chinese protests in 1989. Or Wenceslas Square in Prague during the Velvet Revolution that same year, where 300,000 people gathered under the direction of Václav Havel – an actual dramatist turned leader – shaking their keys in unison to create an unforgettable sound. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-2186457134webready-3fb663a-e1767783864589.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing very large crowds, holding up orange flags outside a large stone building with many windows and arches" title="Supporters of the opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko rally at the Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv in November 2004, after the election run-off was thought to be rigged against him (Image by Getty Images)" /> Similarly, Ukraine’s great protests have centred on the Maidan, Kyiv’s central square, during the Orange Revolution of 2004–05 and again in the Revolution of Dignity in 2014–15, when it became known as the Euromaidan. In each case, the physical setting of the central square of the capital has been vital to the drama and symbolism of protest. The suffragettes, who used violent tactics, are often lauded for having been on the ‘right side’ of history. What does this say about the way historical protests are perceived by posterity? KN: Groups such as the East London Federation of Suffragettes carried out more spectacular actions when moderate, peaceful wings were failing to make progress. This tactical shift in the early 1900s was also highly media-savvy. The suffragettes understood early mass media, staging stunts designed to capture newspaper front pages. Other actions targeted politicians or property: Winston Churchill, post boxes, shops. Because the suffragettes ultimately succeeded, their militancy is incorporated into the national narrative as justified. Movements using similar tactics that fail rarely achieve such recognition; the losers are often excluded from stories of national progress. History can move backwards as well as forwards, but there is a tendency to view the British story as progressive, where ‘winners’ are celebrated and ‘losers’ forgotten. This explains why suffragette militancy is accepted, while comparable violence – for example, during Irish campaigns for independence – is not seen as necessary. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-591947902webready-78185f2-e1767783995489.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a woman shouting amongst a crowd. A man dressed in a dark suit and hat stands next to her" title="Sylvia Pankhurst addresses a meeting of suffragettes in July 1913. The group made smart use of the mass media (Image by Getty Images)" /> TGA: So-called ‘freedom fighters’ who take up arms for independence are often celebrated as heroes if they succeed. History tends to memorialise those who eventually win, often decades after the events. An example is Oxford’s Martyrs’ Memorial, commemorating Protestant bishops who paid the ultimate price during the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary and were celebrated only once their cause prevailed. In Czechoslovakia, the brave student Jan Palach set himself on fire in 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion. Today, Jan Palach Square commemorates his sacrifice – a recognition that would not have been possible if the country had remained under Soviet control. There is a particular category of hero here: the martyr, someone who literally gives their life for a cause. Such figures occupy a special place in these narratives, because their extraordinary courage and ultimate sacrifice have universal resonance. How important has social class been in the history of protest? KN: When asked about the most successful protests or campaigns, examples often include the abolition of slavery and the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 19th century. These movements were largely led by well-connected, relatively wealthy men and women who could exert influence in parliament. Their campaigns were single-issue, respectable, and financially supported, which allowed them to achieve legislative change. By contrast, working-class movements faced a far longer struggle to have their voices heard. Strict class hierarchies and limited resources made it harder to fund campaigns, influence policymakers, or sustain pressure. Yet, despite these constraints, working-class activists often achieved remarkable results with far fewer means than their wealthier counterparts, making their accomplishments all the more significant. TGA: Some protest movements are class-based, with the labour movement being the clearest example. However, protests tend to succeed most when they cross class boundaries and unite different parts of society, because rulers often employ a divide-and-rule strategy. A striking example is the Solidarity movement in Poland during the 1980s. This decade-long mass popular movement succeeded precisely because it united intelligentsia, workers and peasants. KN: This also marks a key difference in 20th century protests. In Britain and Ireland prior to the 1960s, movements were largely class-based, with the labour movement being the strongest. But protests then increasingly took the form of amorphous social movements, not tied to traditional party or trade union structures. These movements sought to connect local struggles with global causes such as environmental campaigns, the anti-Vietnam War movement, peace initiatives and anti-nuclear activism. They were typically more cross-class, framed as part of a wider global struggle rather than a narrow class-based conflict. TGA: One additional factor we haven’t discussed is age. There are striking examples of generational protest movements such as the one that swept across Europe in 1968, including Britain. Climate change activism has emerged as another. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-591947902webready-78185f2-e1767783995489.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a woman shouting amongst a crowd. A man dressed in a dark suit and hat stands next to her" title="Sylvia Pankhurst addresses a meeting of suffragettes in July 1913. The group made smart use of the mass media (Image by Getty Images)" /> What can today’s protesters learn from their predecessors? KN: That raises a central question: how do you organise against repressive regimes? One key factor is achieving a critical mass – breaking out of silos of class or generation and creating a large, united group capable of overcoming fear. This remains a core goal of any successful protest movement. TGA: It is vital to learn from history. For example, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was violently suppressed, and the Czechoslovak attempt to leave the Warsaw Pact in 1968 was met with Soviet invasion. By 1980–81, activists in Poland were far more cautious, learning from these experiences. There are several key lessons. First, maintain nonviolence. As the Polish dissident Adam Michnik warned: “Those who start by storming the Bastille may end up building their own Bastilles.” Nonviolence achieves more enduring results. Read more | Boston Tea Party: your guide to the protest that ignited a revolution Second, achieve a critical mass. Cascade effects and political theatre are essential, especially in the age of social media. A flash mob may appear impactful but, without sustained engagement, it disappears as quickly as it appeared. Third, develop a strategy. Clearly identify what you aim to change and how protest can effect that change. Non-violent movements succeed by targeting potential defectors within existing power structures – those who may be persuaded to switch allegiance. Protest has a promising future, but its lessons are best understood by studying the past. Timothy Garton Ash is Isaiah Berlin professorial fellow and professor of European studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His latest book is Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (Bodley Head, 2023) Katrina Navickas is professor of history at the University of Hertfordshire. Her books include Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England (Reaktion, 2025) This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
In 1756, a young Englishwoman was taken hostage by Barbary pirates. This is her story
Taken hostage by a Barbary ship’s captain in the 18th century, a young Englishwoman found herself fighting for her freedom in Marrakech. Adam Nichols introduces a brave captive who later wrote a book about her dramatic experiences
The Barbary corsair ship appeared suddenly on the horizon, bristling with cannon. Its decks swarming with armed men, it sliced through the waves at a clip that its quarry – the British merchant ship Ann – could not match. At that time, in the mid-18th century, such pirate attacks were violent, bloody affairs; if the Ann’s captain tried to resist, he would be risking the lives of his crew, his passengers and himself, and would likely see his ship sunk. He surrendered. The corsair captain swaggered aboard the British vessel without firing a shot, and surveyed his captives. He was one of the infamous Sallee Rovers operating out of Salé, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, who sold any Europeans they captured into slavery. The captain ordered the Ann’s four passengers to be taken to his ship, along with the crew, who were chained up in the hold. One of the passengers was a young Englishwoman named Elizabeth Marsh, barely 21 years old. It is because of her that we know these details. She later published an account of her experiences: The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts Which Happened in Barbary in the Year 1756, Written by Herself. The corsair attack occurred in August 1756, a few months after the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. Marsh’s father, an administrator for the Royal Navy, had moved his family from their home in Menorca to Gibraltar, which he considered safer. To further protect his daughter, he then booked her a berth on the Ann, which set sail for England in late July. Read more | Liquor, loot and death on the high seas: 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the history of pirates Marsh’s family aspired to be “respectable people”, and she had received a genteel education. The future planned for her was typical of young women of her position and era: to marry a well-to-do man and bear his children. Now, torn from that sheltered life, she faced a very different fate. As a young, attractive European woman, Marsh would have been a highly sought-after commodity in north African slave markets – one that any Moroccan sultan would be very interested in acquiring for his harem. The corsair captain kept Marsh isolated – not for her comfort but to keep her safe and unmolested. One of the other passengers, an English merchant named James Crisp, had been tasked by Marsh’s father with looking after her; he convinced the corsairs that he was her brother, so they permitted him to stay by her side. African captivity After a week at sea, the corsairs reached Salé. There, the British party was housed in a dilapidated building for several uncomfortable and uncertain days. Their situation was complicated. In 1750, England and Morocco had concluded a treaty of mutual cooperation, and were trading partners, with Morocco supplying beef to the British garrison in Gibraltar. However, the Moroccans found the treaty unsatisfactory, and had also been incensed by what they considered to be the disrespectful actions of a British emissary who had attended an audience with the sultan while wearing muddy boots. Marsh and her companions were, technically, hostages rather than outright captives. But the British feared that Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, the Moroccan sultan’s son and heir, might live up to his reputation and take an amorous interest in Elizabeth Marsh. And that is what happened. Marsh and her companions were taken to Marrakech, Sidi Mohammed’s home city – a journey of some 300 miles across rough, mountainous country. On the way, Marsh and Crisp received some advice from a friendly slave: they should now claim to be husband and wife. Sidi Mohammed was in his forties. His father was aging and sick, and Sidi Mohammed would soon inherit the sultanate. For all his power, though, he could not force Marsh into his harem. The Qur’an’s Chapter 4, Verse 24 decrees: “Forbidden to you are women already married, except those whom your right hand possesses” – that last clause being a euphemism for slaves. Marsh was not a slave so, if she and Crisp successfully maintained the fiction of their marriage, Sidi Mohammed could not take her for his harem. Before the acting sultan In Marrakech, Marsh was housed with the other English captives in a house in the town, hostages in the ongoing negotiations between the Moroccans and the English. She was quickly brought before Sidi Mohammed, though, alone and still dishevelled from her long journey. He grilled her about her marriage, observing that married English women customarily wore wedding rings – which she did not. Marsh declared that she had taken off her ring for safety during her voyage. He was not convinced, but he allowed her to depart and rejoin the other captives. At their next meeting, Sidi Mohammed – dressed in a pink satin vest with diamond buttons – presented Marsh with “a great collection of rarities” and told her that, as she recounted it, “he did not doubt of my preferring, in time, his palace to the confined way of life I was then in… and that the curiosities I had seen should be my property”. Marsh declined this offer. Sidi Mohammed, used to having his own way, was not pleased. But then something unexpected occurred. A woman who was in the room started talking to Marsh, using a phrase in Arabic and making encouraging gestures for her to repeat it, which Marsh did. “Too late,” she wrote, “I discovered that I had renounced (completely innocently) the Christian religion by saying in Morisco: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet’.” Read more | Barbary pirates: the Muslim corsairs and their role in the slave trade Marsh was now in real trouble, having unintentionally recited the Shahadah – and thus converted to Islam. According to Qur’anic law, this automatically invalidated her Christian marriage to Crisp, making her fair game for Sidi Mohammed. The Prince, as Marsh refers to him, then resorted to threats. Here is her account: “Throwing off the mask he had hitherto worn, he cruelly informed me that I had renounced the Christian faith and turned Mohometan [Muslim], and that a capital punishment – namely burning at the stake – was, by their laws, inflicted upon all who recanted from... their religion. “The shock of this pronouncement was severe...I assured the Prince that, if I was an apostate, it entirely proceeded from my being tricked, and not from my own inclination, and that if my death would give him any satisfaction, I no longer desired to avoid that last and final remedy to all my misfortunes, for to go on living under the terms he proposed would only add to my misery. “The Prince seemed greatly perplexed by my resolute declaration, and, though he continued his importunities, yet it was now more with the air of a supplicant than that of a sovereign.” Marsh’s language does not really do justice to the drama of the situation. Sidi Mohammed, the second most powerful man in Morocco, threatened to have her burned at the stake if she refused to join his harem. Alone and defenceless, Marsh faced him down and dared him to do it. Baffled by such unexpected and indominable resistance, Sidi Mohammed capitulated and let her rejoin the other captives. Read more | Shipwrecked: the 18th-century looters who endured five months of hell Release and return The political tensions between Britain and Morocco were eventually resolved – in part by the arrival of a British warship – and Marsh and her companions, along with the Ann’s crew, were allowed to depart. Marsh returned to England, where she married James Crisp. However, Crisp went bankrupt and fled to India to try to revive his fortunes, leaving Marsh behind with two small children. Without any means of support, she went to live at her parents’ home in Chatham, Kent. Desperate for money, she resorted to writing a memoir of her captivity in Morocco. Marsh eventually joined her husband in India, where she travelled widely. She died there of breast cancer at the age of 50, surviving a mastectomy without anaesthetic but then succumbing to the disease. Her memoir, The Female Captive, is the first full-length Barbary corsair captivity narrative written by a woman in English. The book enjoyed some notoriety when it was first published but was never a bestseller, and only a single copy is known to survive. If that copy had disappeared, we would likely never know Elizabeth Marsh’s remarkable story. Marsh was not famous. She played no role in world events. Hers was a private life. Yet the courage she showed during her Moroccan ordeal is an example of how ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Adam Nichols is a historian and writer. His latest book is Corsairs and Captives: Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates (Pen & Sword, 2024), featuring Marsh’s full account This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Keep calm and carry on singing: why Britons fell in love with opera during World War Two
As the conflict with Nazi Germany raged on, British tram drivers tuned in to Tchaikovsky and waitresses revelled in Wagner. But why? Alexandra Wilson explores the surprising Second World War obsession with opera
Glasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The soprano Joan Hammond, who sang the title role that night, later recalled that there were always newcomers in the audience wherever the Carl Rosa performed, searching for something different to do – but also for some kind of transcendental escapism. Invariably, they cheered the singers to the rafters. Surprising though it may seem to us today, opera was hugely popular during the Second World War. This was part of a broader surge of interest among the British in the so-called high arts – a sudden and rather urgent desire to ‘become cultured’ and to enjoy the best that life had to offer – when every day might be your last. Guy Ramsey reported in the Daily Mail in 1943 that “every day in every way Britain’s musical and dramatic taste is becoming more and more ‘highbrow’”. Tram drivers were listening to Tchaikovsky, waitresses were revelling in Wagner, and operas were drawing large audiences at provincial theatres. This war, Ramsey wrote, was more personal than any before it, and felt closer to home. Serious times called for serious art, and popular variety shows no longer seemed in step with the national mood. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/2X2FXR2webready-9f2accf-e1767623285427.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph shows a man in a cap with round glasses and a cigarette in his mouth sitting on one of many stools outside a theatre. In front of him to the right, a billboard advertises the Sadler's Wells Opera" title="Stools for hire by people queueing for Sadler’s Wells Opera Company performances at the New Theatre, 1943. Tickets started at just 1/6 (about £4 today) (Image by Alamy)" /> Workers’ playtime Opera had already enjoyed reasonably wide popularity in Britain during the interwar years. In London, the enterprising impresario Lilian Baylis had set up companies at the Old Vic in the 1920s and Sadler’s Wells in the 1930s that were explicitly aimed at fostering a love of opera among local working-class communities. And over in the East End, people could regularly watch operas at the People’s Palace, a large entertainment complex on the Mile End Road. Touring opera companies regularly visited towns and cities around the country, and were eagerly anticipated by people of all social classes. Operatic music could also be widely heard in restaurants, hotel foyers and cinemas, and broadcasting and gramophone records had done a great deal to popularise and democratise the art form. But the opera boom of the early 1940s was in a different league. It would have been logical if opera had ground to a halt during the war, given the large resources conventionally needed to stage performances. To be sure, the most prominent venues did close: the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden was turned into one of the most popular wartime dance halls, and Glyndebourne in East Sussex became a home for evacuees from London. Read more | The War of the Operas: new money vs old in The Gilded Age Sadler’s Wells soldiered on during the early months of the war, staging matinees to get around the problem of blackouts, but soon enough the Blitz put paid to this, and the theatre became a refuge for the newly homeless. However, the company moved its operations to Burnley and toured extensively from there, putting on works including The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, Rigoletto and La bohème with a scaled-down cast, piano accompaniment, a simple painted backcloth and a sofa. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/La-Traviata-9c942fb-e1767623963300.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing two women sharing an afternoon tea on a tray, in a theatre auditorium" title="Audience members sip tea during the interval in a 1943 matinee performance of La Traviata at the New Theatre in London’s West End. The soaring appetite for opera among all classes fuelled a wartime renaissance in Britain (Image by Imperial War Museum)" /> The Times praised Sadler’s Wells for “Making converts to the art of music-drama” in places such as Oldham, Accrington and Stockport. Performances were so popular that theatres were desperate to book the company. The manager of the Hull New Theatre reported that his postbag was constantly full of letters from audience members “representing a cross-section of the community” who wanted to see the troupe. Periodically, when it was safe to do so – and even when it wasn’t – the company returned to London to perform in the West End. The soprano Elisabeth Parry recalled a performance at the Haymarket Theatre in 1944 when the show went on even while alarms rang and ‘Doodlebugs’ (V1 flying bombs) could be heard buzzing overhead. Audience members remained in their seats, and the singers and orchestra carried on as if nothing was happening. The success of the Sadler’s Wells tours showed that the British would happily embrace opera if only they were given the opportunity. Journalists expressed frustration that there had never been a move to set up a similar opera company in every major city around the country, because there was clearly plenty of demand. “No doubt there are as many busmen as there are butchers, bakers, baronets and bankers who enjoy a good opera when they can get it,” argued The Times. And the Times Literary Supplement proposed that, with a dozen more companies along the lines of Sadler’s Wells, “we should have a genuine art of opera in England as we already have a genuine public for it”. Sadler’s Wells worked in partnership with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which also arranged concerts in which professional musicians, including opera singers, performed in factories, air-raid shelters and hospitals. CEMA’s broad aim was to “carry music, drama and pictures to places which otherwise would be cut off from all contact with the masterpieces of happier days and times”. Operatic performances also featured in the Holidays at Home initiative organised by the Ministry of Labour, which turned open areas in cities into makeshift seaside resorts, and put on a wide range of entertainments. One such scheme in Liverpool, which included performances of opera, ran for 11 weeks in 1942 and attracted an audience of three quarters of a million. Arias on the airwaves Of course, there was also plenty of opera on the radio. In 1941, regular monthly broadcasts of studio operas resumed for the first time since the outbreak of war. The emphasis was primarily on well-known classics such as La Traviata and The Barber of Seville because, as the conductor Sir Adrian Boult said, “The evidence is general that the musical public turns to these sources for mental and spiritual recreation more eagerly than ever today.” BBC listener research from 1943 revealed that the numbers listening to variety shows were down by 20 per cent, whereas audiences for classical music and serious drama were on the rise. Read more | The biggest misconceptions about WW2 evacuees? This historian has the answers Victor Hely-Hutchinson, the BBC’s director of music from 1944, wrote that one of the few benefits of the war was the rise of an immense public enthusiasm for good music. “Go to an orchestral concert, or a fine operatic performance,” he said, “and you will find a corporate appreciation and desire for music of a kind, and on a scale, that has never been seen in Britain before.” Radio broadcasts allowed audiences to enjoy the highest standards of singing, which were not always evident in rough-and-ready touring productions. “Stayed at home tonight to listen to Faust – complete – on the wireless,” wrote one unnamed office worker in a diary submission for Mass Observation in 1942. “Feel very grateful to the BBC for giving us first-class opera; it is not often we get first-rate opera in Manchester, and there is nothing worse than good music badly executed.” Many people, men in particular, first encountered opera in the forces. Some took part in amateur operatic productions of works such as Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at military bases in Britain. Others stationed in the Middle East with Paiforce (the Persia and Iraq force) had the opportunity to hear operatic arias in concerts organised by the Entertainments National Service Association. Some of the most respected British opera singers of the day, such as Walter Widdop, Dennis Noble and Miriam Licette, toured that region. But by far the most significant boom in enthusiasm for opera among soldiers was seen in Italy. In 1944, the Daily Express reported that “one of the biggest surprises of our ‘invasion’ of Italy has been the way the men have become opera fans”. Some enterprising army captains reformed the mothballed opera company at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Word soon spread that watching opera was a good way to spend an evening, and British troops took to queueing around the block to get tickets. The 1,600-seat theatre was always full to capacity, and two performances a day had to be scheduled to meet demand. A similar enterprise was also set up at the bomb-damaged and abandoned Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, Sicily and, as the Allies moved north, more companies were founded in major cities across the country. Naomi Jacob, who in 1948 wrote a book about opera aimed specifically at the soldiers who had come to love it in Italy, recalled that when the idea had first been mooted, there had been a lot of scepticism about whether British and American troops would be willing to listen to opera. But houses sold out in advance, and audience members often came back several times. Jacob reported that “no better audience ever existed… they were punctual, they gave rapt attention, and their appreciation was unstinted”. From September 1943 to the end of the war, countless British servicemen watched performances of opera in Italy. The composer and broadcaster Spike Hughes reported that “in every town the same thing happened: the British soldier took to grand opera as if it were in his blood”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1754686839webready-9635b10-e1767623396598.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a stage show. A large ensemble crowd stands at the back of the stage, while one man stands at the front, crouched down with his arm held backwards" title="A 1940s opera performance in Rome. Many British servicemen first experienced – and came to love – opera while stationed in Italy during the war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Exposure to Italian opera in Italy helped soldiers to become more discerning listeners. In Britain before the war, opera was performed in English translation everywhere except Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, two ‘luxurious’ venues that sat apart from the national norm. But here, suddenly, was an audience that had shown itself perfectly capable of appreciating opera in the original language. The Rome correspondent for the Sunday Express reported that “an ‘opera-conscious’ audience is being created for Britain after the war, but if any theatre magnate wants to cater for them he must offer something better than a third-rate touring company”. Optimism for opera Hopes were high, then, for what Britain’s operatic landscape might look like in the postwar period. Even the most sceptical commentators were coming round to opera: the Daily Express reported that “the most ridiculous art-form ever invented” was “proving more popular than anybody ever imagined”. Of course, many people who had encountered opera in pared-back productions during the war had no idea what it really could be. The public was, as The Liverpool Daily Post put it, “as ignorant of the real taste of opera as a wartime infant is of the taste of bananas”. But appetites had been whetted, and Britons emerged from the war wanting to see not only more opera but better opera. To a large extent, these expectations were met. The theatre director Tyrone Guthrie argued after the war that London was becoming the musical centre of the world, with opera at its heart. In the autumn of 1947, audiences in the capital had the opportunity to watch no fewer than 23 different operas performed by five companies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1360190650webready-ae6a690-e1767623509642.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing five women dancing on a stage, in front of a large crowd of men in military uniform, who are all sitting on the floor" title="Servicemen watch a wartime rehearsal by the Entertainments National Service Association, which toured combat zones (Image by Getty Images)" /> A new company based at the Cambridge Theatre in Seven Dials performed Italian opera in Italian to groups of former servicemen and West End shopworkers. For a while, even glamorous Covent Garden presented a form of “opera for the people”, running regional auditions and recruiting talented opera-singing coalminers, secretaries and milkmen as soloists for a new company. Read more | "Hooray! The war is ended": 5 people's recollections of VE Day Some of these initiatives were only short-lived. Even so, there was very much a buzz in the air around opera after the war, with the Musicians’ Union declaring in 1947 that classical music had become “a necessary part of the life of the people”. The wider acceptance of opera as bona fide popular entertainment seemed to be summed up by the fact that when the San Carlo Opera Company from Naples visited just after the war, it performed not only at Covent Garden but also at Butlin’s holiday camps in Filey and Skegness. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/San-Carlo-Opera-Companywebready-ce0beda-e1767624438971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a crowd of women, dressed in dresses and frilly white pinafores. One sits at a piano, surrounded by the others" title="Members of the San Carlo Opera Company of Naples perform at a Butlin’s holiday camp in the mid-1940s. Classical music was now, so the Musicians’ Union declared, “a necessary part of the life of the people” (Image by The Butlin’s Heritage Collection, History of Advertising Trust Archive (HAT))" /> Sadler’s Wells, meanwhile, made a triumphant return to its Islington home, where on 7 June 1945 it staged the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes – a rapturously received work that seemed to signal a hopeful new beginning for British operatic composition. New troupes formed to take touring opera around the country in the late 1940s. The 1940s also saw the foundation of Welsh National Opera – a group of talented amateurs at the outset but later a major player on the British operatic scene. Perhaps most importantly, thanks to the huge explosion of interest in the high arts that had taken place during the war, the nation was far more open-minded towards the possibility of funding it afterwards. Up to this point, public subsidy had only ever been a pipe dream. Now CEMA provided a model for the new Arts Council of Great Britain, which leaned heavily towards favouring opera. Thanks to subsidies, opera could be staged at Covent Garden year-round rather than just for a three-month summer season, and prices could be kept low. The Arts Council also undertook local measures to foster music-making and music appreciation, setting up clubs in workplaces and lending gramophone records. Meanwhile, opera featured prominently on the BBC’s new Third Programme. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WNO-Chorus-in-Ebenezer-Chapel-1946-Idloes-Owen-front-6th-from-the-leftwebready-12658e1-e1767624255173.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph of a large crowd of men and women, sitting in rows" title="Singers with the Welsh National Opera in the 1940s. The company made its debut with a double-bill of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci in 1946 (Image by Welsh National Opera)" /> “Fifteen years ago I should have felt obliged to defend opera as a form of art,” said the critic and academic Edward J Dent in a lecture delivered at Liverpool University in 1945, “but that is no longer necessary.” Opera continued to be enjoyed by large, socially mixed audiences through the 1950s, sixties and seventies, and was drawing record audiences in the eighties and nineties. But by those later decades, the media had begun to circulate a simplistic idea that opera was elitist, and by the turn of the millennium the idea was so entrenched that it was deterring newcomers to the genre. Opera was also becoming more expensive, declining on television and disappearing from the school curriculum. Today, opera still has something for everyone, but it has receded from the mainstream cultural conversation. Regrettably, it has become necessary, once again, to defend it as a form of art. Alexandra Wilson is a senior research fellow at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her latest book is Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (Oxford University Press), published in September 2025 This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
From krakens to serpents: 5 fearsome sea monsters from history
Sea monsters have haunted human imaginations for millennia. From the kraken to killer serpents, Prema Arasu explores what five mythical creatures reveal about our deepest fears
1. Armed and dangerous The writhing tentacles of the kraken inspired horror and disgust Sea monsters have fired our imaginations – and chilled our blood – for as long as humanity has sailed the seas. The Babylonian epic Enūma Eliš, which dates back to at least 1200 BC, describes the creation of the world from two fearsome primordial beings: Apsû, the embodiment of subterranean fresh water, and Tiamat, the sea. Like the many mythical aquatic creatures that have occupied our dreams and our nightmares, Apsû and Tiamat reveal much about how the Babylonians saw the world, acting as projections through which their anxieties about nature could be expressed, examined and, perhaps, mastered. Fast forward more than a thousand years and, in Naturalis Historia (c77 AD), the earliest extant work of natural history, the Roman author Pliny the Elder argued that the largest animals found in the sea “exceed in size any of the terrestrial animals” because of the “superabundance of moisture with which they are supplied”. One such giant creature is the kraken, its origins lying in Nordic mythology and folklore. In his 1752–53 proto-scientific work The Natural History of Norway, Danish bishop Erik Pontoppidan described the “Kraken, Kraxen, or, as some world name it, Krabben” as an island-sized creature, “round, flat, and full of arms, or branches”. Alfred, Lord Tennyson was so energised by reports of this monster of the deep that, in 1830, he wrote a poem in its honour, describing an ancient, giant-armed creature slumbering “Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea.” British naturalist Henry Lee offered a more rational perspective. In Sea Monsters Unmasked (1883), he stated that kraken sightings by sailors were most likely exaggerated reports of giant squid (Architeuthis dux), described a quarter of a century earlier by the Danish biologist Japetus Steenstrup. Even after that, though, kraken and other squid-like monsters proliferated in literature. Herman Melville dedicated a chapter of Moby-Dick (1851) to the giant squid. Ishmael, Moby-Dick’s narrator, references The Natural History of Norway in his description of the creature, offering up the possibility that the kraken might not be a mythological beast but a taxonomically recognised species. Myth and reality continued to amalgamate in the science-fiction genre. Jules Verne’s battle with a giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–70) was based on reports of an encounter between a French corvette, Alecton, and a squid in 1861. As Verne puts it: “Before my eyes was a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvellous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long… Its eight arms… were twice as long as its body, and were twisted like the furies’ hair.” The uncanny undulations of kraken continue to fascinate. Roger Luckhurst, a scholar of the field of horror, links this to our innate “response to things that overwhelm our senses, stick too close, ooze across borders, or refuse to keep a stable shape”. Read more | Water gods and sea goddesses: 17 water deities from world history 2. A feminine fantasy Aquatic half-humans enchanted men and attracted women seeking new freedoms Sirens, tritons, nereids, merfolk, nymphs… part-fish, part-human creatures have gone by many names over the millennia. These alluring beings have glided gracefully into cultural traditions across the world for thousands of years – particularly those with strong histories of seafaring. And, unlike many of the aquatic beings on these pages, they haven’t always done so with malign intentions. In Naturalis Historia, Pliny described “tritons and nereids” as creatures in which “the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still rough all over with scales”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/AKG342658webready-934ba2a-e1767351773509.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A stone relief showing a ship full of men sailing towards three women lined up on the left" title="A fourth-century BC urn shows Odysseus sailing towards the sirens, who, he reported, “sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers” (Image by AKG)" /> Sirens had appeared in Homer’s poem the Odyssey nine centuries earlier. But in the case of this ancient Greek epic, they were never physically described. Rather, we’re told that they “sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers”. Interestingly, they tempt sailors with knowledge, rather than – as other, later, depictions would have it – luring them to their doom. “When we had got within earshot of the land, and the ship was going at a good rate,” the fictional Odysseus recalls, “the sirens saw that we were getting in shore and began with their singing: ‘No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song – and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser’.” In medieval art, Homer’s sirens are interpreted as both aquatic and non-aquatic creatures. In contrast, the nereids of Greek myth were explicitly spirits or embodiments of the sea, albeit often visually depicted as human women. In the Romantic and Victorian imagination, they became synonymous with mermaids, frequently depicted with tails. Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe conjured a fish-tailed ingénue in her 1794 poem The Sea-Nymph, as did Hans Christian Andersen in The Little Mermaid four decades later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/gr0031911Hwebready-444c4de-e1767352384901.jpg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="A drawing showing a mermaid with a black, orange and yellow tail and long blonde hair, laying on her front on a rock, with a sea plant in the background" title="A 1930s depiction of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, which did so much to popularise the fish-tailed ingénue (Image by TopFoto)" /> Radcliffe’s poem marked a turn to the mermaid as a feminine fantasy: an aspirational symbol for young women who might otherwise feel confined by the gendered expectations of public life. This manifests today in the enduring visibility of the mermaid in popular culture and in the burgeoning pastime of mermaiding – cosplaying by swimming with a decorative monofin. 3. Terror in the deep For millennia, giant, ravenous sea serpents have played on humanity’s primal terrors It didn’t pay to get on the wrong side of the gods in ancient mythology. Just ask Laocoön, a Trojan priest who offended the deity Minerva – and didn’t live to tell the tale. As the Roman poet Virgil relates it in the Aeneid – his epic first-century BC poem telling the story of the foundation of Rome – Laocoön committed the cardinal sin of throwing a spear into the Greeks’ wooden horse to show that it was hollow. It was an act that so enraged Minerva that she unleashed two giant sea serpents to eat him. “Taking swift course; their necks were lifted high,” Virgil writes of the ravenous creatures. “Their gory dragon-crests o’ertopped the waves; all else, half seen, trailed low along the sea; while with loud cleavage of the foaming brine, their monstrous backs wound forward fold on fold.” Poor Laocoön didn’t stand a chance. As the priest’s grisly fate proves, the sea serpent had established itself as a terror of the deep by the time the Greeks and Romans dominated the Mediterranean. But they weren’t the first to live in fear of this creature. In fact, the ancient Greeks’ diverse bestiary of monsters likely derived from earlier prototypes. Sea serpents recur in the folklore traditions of a range of coastal and lake cultures, from the black, hairy Nile-dwelling monster Aman Doger of ancient Nubia to the rainbow snake of Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime myth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1288491221webready-92f8e54-e1767351878133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An engraving showing a naked man with curly hair and a beard, with a large snake wrapped around his body, holding him down, alongside his two sons" title="Laocoön and his two sons are attacked by serpents, as shown in a 16th‑century engraving. Could megalophobia – the fear of large objects – be a factor in humanity’s obsession with sea monsters? (Image by Getty Images)" /> For the Victorian naturalist Henry Lee, tales of colossal sea serpents were a case of mistaken identity, likely originating in sightings of other marine phenomena – perhaps large pods of porpoises or whales. “I believe that… the supposed coils or protuberances of the serpent’s body, were only so many porpoises swimming in line in accordance with their habit before mentioned,” he wrote. Read more | Liquor, loot and death on the high seas: 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the history of pirates The anthropologist David D Gilmore has offered an alternative interpretation of our sea serpent obsession. He has suggested that the recurrence of such creatures in literature down the ages points to three primal human fears: of the sea; of what might lurk in the unknown; and of large objects, otherwise known as megalophobia. 4. The theory of de-evolution Early Christians feared that the Leviathan would propel the human race back to its watery past To some, it has been a benign presence. To others, a terror-inducing harbinger of doom. Ever since the Leviathan emerged from the depths of the oceans and floated into the human consciousness, it has meant different things to different people. Jews and early Christians were certainly fearful. In the Hebrew Bible – where it appears in the Old Testament books of Psalms, Job and Isaiah – the Leviathan is a female sea serpent who will bring about the apocalypse together with her male counterpart, the desert monster Behemoth. Such ancient beasts played on the enduring fear of regression, reminding us of our uncomfortable origins in the oceans. David D Gilmore suggests that the water that so often drips from primal monsters as they emerge from the deep “symbolises not only the amniotic fluids of the womb, but also the primal element from which all life emerged”. These creatures threaten us with the possibilities of de-evolution – a stripping of what modern science has decided makes us human. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-534969411webready-723169d-e1767352029623.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A drawing depicting a large black whale being held under a boat, while several people and other sea creatures surround it in the water" title="An illustration from a 14th-century manuscript shows Alexander the Great being lowered into the sea to explore the ocean bed – a place populated by aquatic humans, dogs and a huge whale (Image by Getty Images)" /> For Renaissance cartographers, the Leviathan meant something different. Medieval maps of the world abound with monstrous-looking whales, depicted in ornate detail. According to historian Chet van Duzer, these illustrations served two purposes: to warn sailors of dangers that awaited them at sea, and as decorative elements designed to show off the artist’s talents. By the time the American writer Celia Thaxter penned her poem Leviathan in 1876, the creature had shape-shifted again. For Thaxter, it was a largely peaceful presence, who triumphed against the rage of nature: “For her worst fury he nor stayed nor turned. ‘Twas joy to think in such tremendous play, Through the sea’s cruelty, all unconcerned. Leviathan pursued his placid way!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/CPA0030665webready-7c5c3eb-e1767352254831.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration showing a large grey and orange fish with a man laying next to it, covered in flowers" title="A 14th-century depiction of Jonah with the giant fish that spat him out. Huge sea creatures make numerous appearances in biblical texts (Image by TopFoto)" /> 5. Visions of Atlantis Tales of an aquatic city populated by hyper-intelligent Atlanteans enchanted authors from Plato to HG Wells “A strange vertebrated animal.” That’s how Elstead, the narrator of HG Wells’s 1897 short story In the Abyss, describes the lifeform he encounters on a journey into a deep ocean trench. “Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils,” reported the intrepid submariner. “The vertical pitch of its face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being.” In introducing Elstead to this strange creature, HG Wells was joining a long list of writers to conjure the inhabitants of a mysterious underwater civilisation into fictional life. In fact, the possibility of an intelligent, almost godlike race of aquatic beings living on the ocean bed has captured the imagination for centuries. Mentions of the submerged island Atlantis date back to Plato’s fourth-century BC dialogues Timaeus and Critias, in which the Greek philosopher described a land sunken by a devastating earthquake. Renaissance scholars such as Francis Bacon linked Atlantis to the Americas, a notion he further explored in his utopian novel The New Atlantis (1624). In 1931, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists Henry Bryant and Columbus Iselin embarked upon a research cruise in search of the lost continent around the Azores. It was unsuccessful. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/the-shape-of-water9lp0tuwebready-2ed216e-e1767352125833.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photo of a woman with her hands pressed up against a glass tank, looking into the eyes of a large green sea creature behind the glass" title="2017 dark fantasy film The Shape of Water, which traces the relationship between a mute woman and a captured humanoid amphibian (Image by MovieStills)" /> Tales of Atlantis made a resurgence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1929 novel The Maracot Deep features a team of scientists who descend into the ocean, become trapped in a deep-sea trench and are saved from disaster by descendants of Atlantis. Other underseas peoples in popular fiction aren’t quite so benign. American horror writer HP Lovecraft described an undersea race of creatures called Deep Ones who worship the deities Dagon and Cthulhu. In The Shadow Over Innsmouth Lovecraft projects his own prejudices about racial purity and miscegenation (sexual relationships between people of different ethnic groups) onto a fictional coastal town. Here the residents interbreed with marine beings and become corrupted in form and character. Read more | Tails from the deep: separating the real folklore of mermaids from Disney stories The denizens of cities under the sea continue to capture our imaginations today. Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning 2017 film The Shape of Water tells how a mute cleaner working in a high-security government laboratory falls in a love with a green-skinned humanoid amphibian. This enduring interest in aquatic beings speaks to a wider fascination with how great civilisations might fall. This is an intriguing and alarming prospect. After all, if a creature is to knock us off our self-appointed perch at the top of the evolutionary ladder, then surely that creature could come from the same primordial soup as we once did? Prema Arasu is an adjunct research fellow at the University of Western Australia, and author of The Book of Sea Monsters: Leviathans of Literature (Adlard Coles, 2025) This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Nero's doomed love affair: did a failed romance trigger his descent into madness?
He’s reviled as a cruel tyrant who killed his own mother and fiddled while Rome burned. But was Nero’s descent into madness triggered by his failed romance with a former slave? Edward J Watts tells a story of murder, incest and political intrigue
It is difficult to feel empathy for the emperor Nero, a man who did such unquestionably terrible things that he has become a prototype for the monstrous Roman ruler. During his lifetime he was labelled a matricide, an arsonist and a persecutor of Christians who also killed his pregnant wife by kicking her in the stomach. After his death, these stories grew into terrifying legends about his cruel madness. By the Middle Ages, chroniclers even detailed a tale in which Nero commanded doctors to make him give birth. Fearing for their lives, the terrified doctors “made up a potion in which they put a frog and gave it to the emperor to drink”, while prescribing him a special diet that would cause his stomach to expand. When Nero vomited the animal out, he “commanded that the foetus be fed and kept in a domed chamber” as his imperial heir. Some manuscripts even featured an image of Nero on a birthing chair beside his frog-child to illustrate his “evil madness”. And yet it is not hard to imagine a different life for Nero. This is because, before Nero became a monster, he was a heartbroken boy prohibited from marrying Acte – his one true love. Family trauma The tragic history of Nero’s family made it all the more surprising that he found such a romantic partner. His mother, Agrippina, was the daughter of Germanicus – the man whom Rome’s second emperor, Tiberius, hoped would assume imperial power following his planned retirement. When Germanicus predeceased Tiberius, however, his wife and children became potential rivals and were ultimately arrested. Agrippina’s mother starved to death in captivity, while her brother took his own life by eating the mattress in his cell. Their fates taught the princess that real financial and political security came only from a strong connection to some devoted, powerful male figure. She married thrice, each time to a rich and powerful suitor. Her first marriage, which was celebrated in AD 28 when she was just 13 years old, joined Agrippina to her 30-year-old cousin, Domitius Ahenobarbus. Nero was born to the couple in AD 37, and the child not only inherited his father’s fortune when Ahenobarbus died in AD 41, but also that of Agrippina’s second husband, Passienus Crispus, who died six years later. In AD 49, Agrippina wed her uncle, the elderly emperor Claudius. She persuaded Claudius to name Nero as his heir and to marry his natural-born daughter Octavia to Nero in AD 53. Between her husband and her son, Agrippina finally seemed to have the security she had long craved. Read more | Monsters of Rome: do emperors such as Nero and Caligula deserve their reputations? As Claudius’s natural-born son Britannicus entered adolescence, however, the emperor began to reconsider Nero’s appointment as successor designate. But Claudius suddenly died on 13 October AD 54, poisoned by a mushroom that Agrippina may or may not have arranged for him to eat. The 16-year-old Nero was now Roman emperor. Britannicus would be dead within a year. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/7-NeronyAgripina-6f8fc45-e1766490879177.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marble statue showing a woman crowning a man. Both are dressed in Roman clothes" title="A relief shows Agrippina crowning Nero with a laurel wreath. The 16-year-old boy became emperor following the death of his mother's third husband (and uncle), Claudius (Image by Wiki Commons)" /> Acte enters the scene Everyone in Rome, except perhaps for Nero himself, understood that Nero’s status as Claudius’s legitimate heir derived in large part from his marriage to Octavia. It was then essential for the young couple to remain together. Nero, however, found his wife physically repulsive, and began searching for more attractive and interesting sexual partners. This is how Acte entered his life. The girl, who had been bought as a slave in the Roman province of Asia, was seen by the men around Nero as someone who “could fulfil his desires without harm to anyone” since, as the historian wrote, “it was feared that he might rush into scandalous behaviour with noble ladies, if he were not permitted this indulgence”. Tacitus’s words reflect the Roman idea that enslaved people like Acte were, in a sense, disposable commodities whose bodies could be used by noble men to fulfil the urges their wives could not. When the men tired of “the debaucheries… that vice made overwhelmingly attractive”, they were supposed to dispose of the slaves who had serviced them. This is how elite men often behaved, but no one anticipated that, instead of using and dismissing the girl, Nero would fall in love with Acte. Not only had she quickly won Nero’s affections, but their intense connection would lead to her emancipation and talk of Nero’s desire to marry her. Agrippina was incensed when she learned that this sexual dalliance had evolved into a genuine romance. Tacitus says that she “raved with a woman’s fury about having… a slave girl for a daughter-in-law”, but that “the fouler her reproaches, the fiercer the passion Nero felt”. Read more | One of ancient Rome’s most notorious emperors murdered his own mother, and there's a dark reason why Finally, Agrippina snapped and yelled at her son: “It was I who made you emperor!” This entirely true but extremely unwise outburst was too much for the headstrong teenage emperor to bear. It was at that point, writes Tacitus, that Nero “threw off all respect for his mother”. Rise of the sycophants Sensing an opportunity, men like the future emperor Otho and the senator Seneca stepped forward to exploit the emperor’s hurt feelings and growing estrangement from Agrippina. Otho, a fashionable party boy from an aristocratic family, offered emotional support to Nero during wild drinking sessions, in which the emperor confessed to Otho far more than was wise. Meanwhile, Seneca offered more practical aid by enlisting an associate who was willing to pretend to be in love with Acte, so he could “serve as the ostensible giver of the presents secretly sent by the emperor to the girl”. The appreciative emperor was too naïve to realise that these men encouraged his love affair precisely because it weakened his bond with Agrippina and made him more likely to reward them in the future. Agrippina was not so foolish. “Changing her tactics,” Tacitus writes, she went to her son and “pleaded guilty to an ill-timed strictness”. She even “offered the seclusion of her chamber” for Nero and Acte to use so that their activities did not further embarrass Octavia. This shift in Agrippina’s attitude was sensible politics and good parenting, but Nero’s “most intimate friends… begged him to beware of the arts of a woman” who, they claimed, “was always daring and was now lying”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/8-gettyimages-1157131481-594x594-528e6a8-e1766491080872.jpg" width="579" height="413" alt="A painting showing a group of Roman" title="An 1881 book illustration imagines Nero participating in a bacchanal. The young emperor indulged in marathon drinking sessions, in which he told acquaintances of his desires for Acte (Image by Getty Images)" /> As Agrippina’s views softened, Nero’s sycophants became even more strident in their support of Nero’s relationship with Acte. According to the historian Suetonius, one group of senators even “perjured themselves by swearing that she [Acte] was of royal birth”, so she would quickly become a suitable imperial spouse. The senators were rewarded by Nero, even though it is not clear if anyone besides Nero expected their claim to be persuasive. Murder, intrigue and incest Not long after the predictable failure of this gambit, Nero realised that despite his love for Acte, the gulf between their social statuses was too great for them to ever wed. The affair then ended and both people moved on. Inscriptions from Italy reveal that Acte had a good, productive life, in which she used the profits from some of Nero’s gifts to become a wealthy patron of several towns. Nero’s story, of course, has a much sadder ending. As the years passed, the emperor grew ever more estranged from his mother and became enmeshed in the intrigues of sycophants like Otho, who enticed the emperor into a scandalous love affair with his wife, Poppaea. Tacitus reports that Otho embarked on the scheme “to inflame Nero's passion, in the hope of adding to his own influence by the further tie which would arise out of possession of the same woman”. The affair led Nero to divorce Octavia and force the dissolution of Otho’s marriage so that he could marry Poppaea – the wife he is later rumoured to have killed while she was pregnant with his child. This chapter in the emperor’s romantic life was, of course, much more shocking and tragic than his relationship with Acte. Meanwhile, the senator and Neronian associate Cluvius Rufus reports an even more appalling sexual incident that Nero only just escaped. He tells of how Agrippina tried seducing Nero “in her eagerness to retain her influence”. Seneca then hurried in Acte, who told Nero that the incest was “notorious” and that the soldiers would never endure the rule of an “impious sovereign”. While Rufus’s unreliability as a narrator ought to make one suspect whether Agrippina’s seduction really happened, his description of Acte as the one person who could be counted on to restrain Nero’s worst impulses rings true. She seemed capable of getting Nero to accept uncomfortable truths, because the emperor knew that she alone was genuinely concerned about his best interests. Read more | Think you know everything about ancient Rome? These 25 facts will prove otherwise Descent into madness Despite Nero’s increasingly poor decisions and unrestrained behaviour over the last decade of his life, it seems that Acte was never again summoned to the palace to check his worst impulses. She was not there when Nero arranged for Agrippina to be killed in AD 59, or when he burned Christians alive following a fire that devastated Rome in AD 64. She was not consulted before he went to Greece in AD 67 to compete in rigged Olympic competitions while popular anger boiled over at home. She seems not to have been involved as Nero bungled his response to the rebellion of the future emperor Galba, when he spent more time figuring out how to transport his water organ to the front than he did planning military strategy. Most heartbreaking of all, she was absent when Nero took his own life, virtually alone, after the senate stripped him of his imperial power in AD 68. And yet Acte clearly still loved Nero until the very end of his short life. After his death and public condemnation, Acte joined with the two nursemaids who had raised Nero as a baby to ensure that he had a proper burial. According to Suetonius, the ceremony cost “two hundred thousand sesterces”, an immense sum equal to the annual salary of more than 220 Roman soldiers. Nero was “laid out in white robes embroidered with gold” and, after his cremation, Acte and the two other women “deposited his ashes… in the family tomb of [his father’s family] the Domitii” in a “sarcophagus of porphyry, with an altar of Luna marble standing above it, and enclosed by a balustrade of Thasian stone.” We cannot know whether Acte’s affection, forthrightness and intelligence would have been enough to save Nero from infamy had the pair been permitted to marry. The emperor is fully deserving of the cruel reputation for which he is now remembered. What is certain, though, is that Nero’s descent into madness began when his relationship with Acte ended: the first woman he ever loved, and perhaps the only woman who ever loved him back. Edward J Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of the book The Romans: A 2,000-Year History (John Murray Press/Basic Books, 2025)
Father Christmas v Santa Claus: the centuries-long battle for Britain's chimneys
The true identity of the white-bearded, red-robed figure who fills children’s stockings at Christmas has long been debated. Thomas Ruys Smith sizes up the merry contenders
Tis the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature is stirring… but someone is. While the household sleeps, a jolly visitor carefully places presents in stockings hung by the fireplace. After taking a sip of whatever tipple has been thoughtfully left out for him, he pockets a carrot and disappears up the chimney. With a tinkle of sleigh bells he disappears into the night with his faithful reindeer, a merry laugh echoing across the rooftops. It’s a familiar ritual – with one fundamental point of contention. Who do you think it was that brought you these presents? Are you a Father Christmas fundamentalist or are you a Santa Claus supporter? Each figure has his passionate partisans, and each is wrapped up with issues of national and regional identity. A recent YouGov poll of around 4,000 British residents suggested that the UK is split right down the middle on the topic – though Santa enjoyed a narrow lead by a couple of percentage points. What you may find surprising is that this isn’t a modern conundrum. In fact, the ongoing battle for seasonal supremacy has created a schism in British culture since the Victorian era. Despite what some Father Christmas traditionalists might think, Santa Claus is not some recent American arriviste. The forgotten history of the friendly rivalry between this pair of festive icons goes much further back, taking us on a transatlantic journey through popular culture to a time even before our modern celebration of Christmas was taking shape. Nick of time Let’s start at the beginning – or as close as we can get to it. The figure of Father Christmas is undoubtedly more venerable than Santa Claus – in English culture, at least. References to characters who served to personify the period of yuletide feasting and merrymaking can be traced back to at least the 15th century. But Father Christmas really emerged as a champion of the season when Christmas came under threat in Britain. He joined the fray in the midst of religious and cultural arguments during the Civil War, when Puritans tried to suppress traditional Christmas celebrations. One anti-Puritan pamphlet written in 1652 lamented that Father Christmas, who could once “knock down Hercules”, was lately suffering from “a deep consumption”, his might sadly diminished. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-526608136webready-8247d2a-e1765964190971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a family gathered around a large Christmas tree. On the wall behind them is a banner that reads Merry Christmas" title="A c1895 photograph of a family at Christmas. The Victorians revived historic festive traditions as well as creating new ones (Image by Getty Images)" /> Christmas celebrations and Father Christmas both returned with the Restoration. But it wasn’t until the Victorian revival of historic traditions, and its creation of new ones, that Father Christmas was truly reinvigorated as the presiding spirit of the season. Certainly, Charles Dickens’ portrait of the jovial Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol (1843) owes a lot to the established idea of Father Christmas as the personification of yuletide celebrations – crowned with winter greenery, and accompanied by bountiful piles of food and a brimming wassail bowl. This iteration had no truck with reindeer, though, and he certainly never stuffed a stocking – at least, not until his American rival started to descend British chimneys. Read more | The history of Christmas, plus 10 festive facts you might not know Enter Santa Claus. Tracing his origins takes us across the Atlantic to 18th-century New England. Puritan colonists, in common with their English counterparts, had been positively averse to Christmas celebrations, but plenty of European immigrants imported their Christmas celebrations to America, where they took root and found new forms. A wealth of winter gift-bringers set up shop in their respective immigrant communities, from the Dutch Saint Nicholas (and his secularised counterpart Sinterklaas) to wilder figures such as Knecht-Ruprecht and Belsnickel from Germany. Undoubtedly, Father Christmas made the trip across the Atlantic, too; despite the Puritans’ best efforts, he found a warmer reception in the Southern colonies. The figure of Santa Claus emerged from this characteristically diverse American melting pot. Tantalising references to a distinctive new seasonal gift-bringer started to emerge in the late 18th century. As his name suggests, Santa Claus took inspiration from Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop of Myra (in what’s now Turkey), about whom tales were told of secret gift-giving. But elements of other European traditions are evident, too. In appearance, Santa was more rough and ready than might be imagined. And, rather than appearing on 5 or 6 December (the feast day of Saint Nicholas), when he came to homes in many parts of central Europe, Santa Claus visited American families on Christmas Eve. The age of Santa Though the exact origins of Santa Claus remain murky, 1821 certainly marked a key moment in his emergence onto the seasonal stage. That Christmas, an ephemeral publication for young readers called The Children’s Friend was published in New York. From its richly illustrated pages leapt the now-recognisable figure of ‘Old Santeclaus’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/J4X8XGwebready-62d3a57-e1765963962733.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“Old Santeclaus” depicted in an illustration from The Children’s Friend (1821), which marked his emergence onto the seasonal stage in the US (Image by Alamy)" title="“Old Santeclaus” depicted in an illustration from The Children’s Friend (1821), which marked his emergence onto the seasonal stage in the US (Image by Alamy)" /> This character visited children on Christmas Eve, left presents in their hanging stockings, and travelled in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. Whether this reflected folk traditions that were already in evidence or newly invented them for its young readers – it was probably a bit of both – the age of Santa had arrived. Almost immediately, his public profile was boosted by the 1823 publication – initially anonymous – of a poem that is still very familiar to us today: Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St Nicholas. Though that title called him by his older name, the newspaper in which it appeared introduced the verses as a “description of that unwearied patron of children… Sante Claus”. Moore’s timing was perfect: soon the poem became an emblem of a new kind of domestic Christmas centred on the family, the home and the excitement of children waiting for their stockings to be filled by a magical visitor. In the US, it did much to spread the legend of Santa Claus to eager young ears. “Just think of it!” exclaimed an American commentator in 1875. “Until we had heard or read this, we didn’t know much about him.” Read more | The child-eating Christmas Yule Cat: what are the origins of this Icelandic folklore? Over the decades that followed, American writers and artists continued to develop Santa’s backstory, locating his base in the north pole, revealing his workshop of elves, and even giving him a wife. By the middle of the 19th century, Santa Claus’s reach had expanded from his regional base in and around New York to become a ubiquitous figure in American Christmases. “Nobody ever saw him,” as one American described in 1853, “though everybody has heard of him.” Emboldened by such success, Santa looked to expand his empire further still. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1283479122webready-e55e347-e1765964523934.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A picture showing a young bearded man dressed in red and green robes and a red hat, holding a book and plate of fruit in one hand with his other hand held up in the air" title="A c1890 lithograph of Nicholas of Bari, also known as Saint Nicholas of Myra. The US version of Santa Claus can trace his roots to this fourth-century bishop (Image by Getty Images)" /> American influence Then as now, the potent slices of American popular culture that crossed the Atlantic had a profound effect on the seasonal behaviour of the young – not to mention their demands on parents – in Britain. Slowly but surely, Santa Claus gained a foothold in the Old World, his legend disseminated in popular literature. Reprints of Moore’s poem were certainly circulating in Britain by the 1850s, and probably earlier. Published in the Illustrated London News in 1855, it was accompanied by some useful advice for British children looking to emulate their American counterparts: “Before going to bed, the children hang their newest stockings near the chimney, or pin them to the curtains of the bed. Midnight finds a world of hosiery waiting for favours; and the only wonder is that a single Santa Klaus can get around among them all.” One American book, now largely forgotten, seems to have had a particular impact on the profile of Santa Claus in Britain. Sisters Susan and Anna Warner shot to fame in 1850 when the former published The Wide, Wide World, one of the bestselling books of the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands of British readers read of its heroine, Ellen Montgomery, hanging up her stocking for Santa at Christmas-time – and perhaps emulated her hopeful act. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/PC600Mwebready-f75c38f-e1765965239337.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration showing three small children in white gowns, hanging a stocking from a fireplace" title="A c1870 illustration for Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, which disseminated the idea of hanging up stockings in the US. The poem had made its way to Britain by the 1850s (Image by Alamy)" /> Even more significant was the sisters’ 1853 story Carl Krinken; or, a Christmas Stocking. The tale of a poor young American boy visited by Santa Claus one Christmas Eve, it seems to have captivated a generation of young Victorians. Looking back to her mid-century childhood, British writer Sarah Tooley recalled that the Warners’ book did more than anything “to popularise the visits of Santa Claus in our own country”; when British children read the story of Carl’s adventures, it “caught their imagination, and ‘St Nick’ is now almost as popular in London as in New York”. New British editions of the book were still being produced in the closing years of the 19th century. As early as 1856, reviewing the transformations of Christmas celebrations over the previous decade or so, one Birmingham newspaper marvelled that Christmas stockings were already an established part of the season, “for Santa-Claus has had the temerity to scale the wooden walls of old England, of late years”. Having scaled those walls, Santa became a familiar presence in British Christmases for the remaining years of the 19th century. As the London Evening Standard judged in 1861, “the children of England may be pleased with the advent of Santa Claus”. Even as late as 1896, a writer for the Manchester Courier declared: “I do think that Santa Claus is the most beautiful myth which ever comes into our lives.” So, when Victorian children hung up their stockings, it was Santa Claus that they expected to fill them. Not that Father Christmas retreated entirely in the face of Santa’s celebrity. He increasingly appeared on cards and in magazine illustrations as an embodiment of the festive season. In the late 19th century, at least, there was clearly room for both figures in the landscape of British Christmas celebrations. In 1876, for example, the Darlington & Richmond Herald found space in its account of the coming “Christmastide” for a tribute to both “Old Father Christmas” as the incarnation of the “merry season” and the American newcomer who had become a central part of domestic celebrations: “We envy not the home where the Christmas stocking… is not an established institution and Santa Claus one of the patron saints of the children’s calendar.” Read more | How to host a medieval Christmas Blurred figures It wasn’t long, though, before the outlines of these defined figures, with their distinctive roles, began to blur and merge. Even in the 1880s, Father Christmas was sometimes named as the figure who filled festive stockings. The shadow of war and a growing jingoism seems to have sped up that process, and national tensions found their way into Christmas debates. In 1912, one rather confused memoirist, looking back to his childhood in the mid-19th century, declared: “I am glad to say that in those days people knew nothing (at any rate, they knew nothing in our part of England) about such German things as ‘Christmas Trees’, or such German saints as ‘Santa Claus’. Our Christmas presents were found in stockings, and put there by Father Christmas.” He was taken to task for this assertion by a correspondent to Notes & Queries magazine, who attempted to set the record straight. “I am as John Bullish as may be but I do not remember finding any gifts in my youthful socks or stockings,” they wrote, “and have an impression that my first introduction to the contemplation of such cornucopias was in the pages of an American story-book.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-90018255webready-9d925e7-e1765964970850.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An American Christmas card printed at the turn of the 20th century depicts Santa Claus as we still know him today – sporting a red outfit with fluffy white trimming, driving a sleigh loaded with presents and drawn by flying reindeer (Image by Getty Images)" title="An American Christmas card printed at the turn of the 20th century depicts Santa Claus as we still know him today – sporting a red outfit with fluffy white trimming, driving a sleigh loaded with presents and drawn by flying reindeer (Image by Getty Images)" /> Such memories soon faded, though, and by 1933 one newspaper laid out a deceptively simple answer to the question of who exactly stuffed British stockings: “Here we call him Father Christmas, in America he is Santa Claus.” The patriotic preference for a home-grown gift-bringer was, at least temporarily, in the ascendancy. Since then, the pair have been locked in a struggle for Britain’s stockings. If Father Christmas’s status rose in the 20th century, Santa Claus has clearly made inroads into the psyche of Britain’s children in recent decades; apparently, he has even gained a narrow lead this century. However, even the most ardent Father Christmas fanatic shouldn’t panic about this apparent Americanisation of British culture. Arriving from across the Atlantic at the precise moment that our modern Christmas was taking shape in the Victorian era, Santa Claus should be considered as much a part of our traditional celebrations as Christmas trees, Christmas crackers, Christmas cards – and good old Father Christmas himself. In the spirit of the season, let’s call a truce between these jovial icons. This yuletide, if you really want to honour festive tradition, raise a glass to Father Christmas in thanks for your family’s feast and the blessings of the season – but make sure to hang out your stocking for Santa Claus. Thomas Ruys Smith is professor of American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia. His new book is Searching for Santa Claus (Boiler House Press, November 2025)
George Washington is an American hero – so why was he the pride of Victorian England?
He may be a symbol of US independence, but George Washington’s family tree is firmly rooted on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Sam Edwards visits the English towns and villages that the president’s ancestors once called home
In 1886 a remarkable discovery in Lancashire, England, shed important new light on what one newspaper called the “vexed question of the ancestry of George Washington”. The discovery came during restoration work at St Oswald’s Church in Warton, a small village in the north of the county overlooked by a rocky crag and an Iron Age hill fort. As workmen chipped away at some of the old plaster on the church tower’s exterior, they were amazed to uncover “the coat of arms and name of the Washington family”. The news was received in Lancashire and beyond with delight. Indeed, despite his central role in leading the American Revolution, George Washington had long been a popular figure in Britain. He was often praised by the British press for his citizen virtue and skills as a military leader, and his death in December 1799 was mourned on both sides of the Atlantic. On learning of his passing, some of the ships of the Royal Navy’s fleet even lowered their flags to half-mast as a mark of respect. Little wonder that the discovery of Washington’s family crest at Warton was greeted with such enthusiasm. Here at last, after many years of detailed genealogical research, was something definitive, something literally carved in stone. The coat of arms at St Oswald’s provided clear proof that the Washington family tree had roots in the Lancashire loam. The timing could not have been more perfect. The relationship between the US and UK governments was just then becoming increasingly friendly – a development the historian Bradford Perkins later termed the ‘Great Rapprochement’. This was a good time, in short, to discover (and proclaim) Washington’s ‘Englishness’, particularly because his stock in the United States was riding especially high. Only a couple of years earlier, a huge obelisk in his memory had been dedicated in the nation’s capital, which still dominates the city skyline even now. British enthusiasm for Washington persisted over the subsequent decades. In the early 20th century, correspondents to The Times could still be found regularly (and excitedly) debating the first president’s English lineage, and by the 1920s there was a veritable ‘cult’ of Washington on this side of the pond. Today, five places in England can claim a close tie to Washington, as we reveal below… <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/1C5FTDE-8166170-e1766161751458.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a white village pub with a red and gold sign saying George Washington. To the left, there is a large church tower" title="The George Washington pub in Warton is only a short distance from the church where the first president’s distant relatives, Elizabeth and Thomas Washington, are buried (Image by Alamy)" /> 1. Warton, Lancashire Where you can sup a pint in a pub named for George It’s fair to say that although George Washington was aware of a family connection to “one of the northern counties of England” he knew very little beyond that. The discovery of the family crest on the church tower in Warton therefore revealed that Washington’s instincts were correct. His family was indeed from a northern county – Lancashire – and it was quickly apparent that the ties to Warton went very deep. By 1888, one local historian, Henry Whitman, had even documented these ties in a special volume titled The Washingtons and their Connection with Warton. Among the local details Whitman recounted were a Washington grave (of Elizabeth, died in 1751, and of Thomas Washington, died in 1823) and a Washington House (dated 1612, and located on the village’s main street). Both the grave site and the house duly became key destinations for Washington pilgrims. In 1932, a large group of Americans visited the village to mark the bicentennial of Washington’s birth and, before departing, took time to lay a wreath at the grave of Elizabeth and Thomas. They were followed a decade later by groups of Lancashire-based American troops who left behind a Stars and Stripes flag that was subsequently flown from the tower of St Oswald’s every 4th July. Read more | George Washington: your guide to the war hero, founding father, first US president and slave owner And then, in 1976, the bicentennial of the American Revolution was celebrated in Warton with 10 days of festivities. The carefully planned events unfolded during a now-legendary summer heatwave and the partygoers became so parched that they literally drank the local bar dry! In 1998, the pub in question – The Black Bull – changed its name to The George Washington. Today, you can sup a pint under an American flag and just a short walk from where Washington’s distant relatives, Elizabeth and Thomas, are buried. 2. Whitehaven, Cumbria The burial place of George’s grandmother – and the only place in England invaded by the US Navy Lancashire isn’t the only northern county to claim a connection to the first president. In Whitehaven in Cumbria (historic Cumberland) there’s a Washington link that is even closer. The town, once heavily involved in the trade with the American colonies, is the final resting place of Mildred Gale, George Washington’s paternal grandmother, who died here in 1701. Born and raised in Virginia, Mildred was married to a Lawrence Washington (one of many in the Washington clan – see below for more details) and it was one of their children – Augustine – who became the father of George. Following Lawrence’s untimely death (in 1698), Mildred married George Gale of Whitehaven, hence why she was in town in 1701. The exact cause of her own death is unclear, though it was most probably some sort of disease as her infant child and maid also perished. The latter, a young woman by the name of ‘Jane’, was likely enslaved, though she was referred to in the parish burial register as a “negro servant”. Notably, Jane seems to have been buried in the same grave as Mildred. It was many years later, in 1876 – the 100th anniversary of the American Revolution – that the town’s Washington link was properly rediscovered. The link drew still more attention in the 20th century and a plaque commemorating the connection was unveiled in the church in 1955. Sadly, the church was severely damaged by fire in 1971, but a new memorial tablet was erected in 2006. Interestingly, this is not the town’s only link to the events of the American Revolution. In April 1778 a contemporary of George Washington – John Paul Jones – led a naval raid on Whitehaven. Jones’s plan was to disable the town’s guns and then set the ships in the harbour alight. The attack was only a partial success, however, because soon after their landing several of Jones’s men proceeded to the first pub they could find where they duly got drunk! Today, Whitehaven is proud of its connection to John Paul Jones. In 1999, the town even issued a declaration allowing one US Navy man o’ war per year to enter the harbour without charge. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/32JTB0N8-6fc0297-e1766162039230.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Despite its connection to George Washington’s medieval ancestors, Washington Old Hall was nearly demolished in the 1930s. It is now under the care of the National Trust (Image by Alamy)" title="Despite its connection to George Washington’s medieval ancestors, Washington Old Hall was nearly demolished in the 1930s. It is now under the care of the National Trust (Image by Alamy)" /> 3. Washington Old Hall, Tyne and Wear Visited in 1977 by another president with local roots The Washington family seems to have first arrived in the Warton area as far back as the late 13th century, when a Robert Washington married into the Strickland family at nearby Sizergh Castle. Robert’s name – Washington – was derived from the village in County Durham where he lived, and he took it with him when he headed west. However, a branch of the family remained in County Durham until the end of the 14th century, and their impressive home still stands today: Washington Old Hall. Parts of the building likely go back to the age of the very first Washington – William (great-great grandfather of Robert) – and in the centuries that followed it had a remarkable life, going from a medieval manor house to a Victorian tenement. By the 1930s the house had fallen into disrepair and so an organisation was formed to purchase and restore it. In 1956, the National Trust assumed responsibility for its care and maintenance. The hall’s moment in the limelight came in May 1977 when huge crowds gathered there to welcome President Jimmy Carter. Carter was on an official tour of the northeast, and the hall was his second stop. The first was at Newcastle Civic Centre where he gave a speech which began with the now-famous words (delivered in almost passable Geordie) “Howay the lads”! 4. Sulgrave Manor, Northamptonshire A ‘shrine’ to George, deep in the English countryside If the Old Hall in Washington has the earliest English connection to the first president, it’s nonetheless another rural country seat that claims the title of being his ancestral home: Sulgrave Manor in deepest Northamptonshire. Tudor in origin, the house was built by Lawrence Washington (the first of several ‘Lawrences’ in the Washington genealogy) and it remained in the family until the mid-17th century. After the Washingtons’ departure it was occupied by various tenant farmers, and by the 20th century it had fallen into disrepair. The manor was subsequently saved thanks to the intervention of several high-profile figures, including Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States from 1901–09. ‘Teddy’, as he was known, was keen to mark the centennial of the Treaty of Ghent, the agreement that had ended the War of 1812 (which had seen British troops march on Washington and burn down the White House). Read more | Pardon me, are you Aaron Burr, sir? The real story of the maligned Founding Father and 'villain' of Hamilton By 1914, fundraising in both countries had enabled the purchase of the house, but the outbreak of the First World War then delayed the plans for its repair and reconstruction. The restored manor was finally unveiled as a ‘shrine’ to the Anglo-American relationship in June 1921. Interestingly, this was not the only celebration of George Washington’s English connections that summer. Just a week after the events at Sulgrave, a statue of the first president was unveiled in London overlooking Trafalgar Square. The two projects were in fact closely connected and so the statue’s dedication similarly involved various influential figures. One of these was Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary, whose unveiling speech went so far as to claim Washington as a “Great Englishman”. In the years afterwards a popular myth developed around the statue: to honour Washington’s vow never to set foot on English soil, it was said that the statue was purposefully placed on earth imported from his home state of Virginia. Unfortunately, nothing in the archival record suggests that this is true. But the myth has been so powerful that following the recent re-dedication of the statue, in June 2025, some soil from Washington’s Mount Vernon home was indeed placed beneath the pedestal. 5. Purleigh and Maldon, Essex The key link to the very first Washingtons of Virginia By the time the Washingtons sold Sulgrave in the mid-17th century, one branch of the family had settled at Purleigh in Essex, 10 miles to the east of Chelmsford. This was where clergyman Reverend Lawrence Washington – the great-grandson of the Lawrence who had built the manor at Sulgrave – had been given the wealthy parish of All Saints. However, the good reverend’s commitment to the Crown during the Civil War led him to fall out of favour with the Puritan authorities and he later died in poverty in 1652. Perhaps this was why his son John opted to find a future in the North American colonies, landing in Virginia in 1657. John’s son – yet another Lawrence – was born in the colony in 1659, and it was he who married Mildred (later buried at Whitehaven). Of their three surviving children, one – Augustine – was to be the father of George Washington. Read more | Is this the secret to understanding US foreign policy? How a powerful doctrine from 1823 reshaped America When Reverend Lawrence Washington died, he was buried not in his old parish at Purleigh, but in nearby Maldon, and in 1928 a memorial window was dedicated there to commemorate this fact. The window was a gift from the citizens of the similarly named Malden in Massachusetts and was unveiled, very deliberately, on 5th July (just a day after Independence Day). The keen-eyed will see that towards the top of the window’s central panel is an image of the Washington coat of arms: three stars in red, above four bars in red and white. This is the very same heraldic sign that had been uncovered by workmen in Warton all those years before, and a long-running (though unproven) myth holds that it was in fact the inspiration for the Stars and Stripes of the American flag. Dr Sam Edwards is a reader in modern political history at Loughborough University
AI: good or bad for history? Our experts weigh in
As artificial intelligence penetrates almost every aspect of our lives, six historians debate whether the opportunities it offers to the discipline outweigh the threats
“We must experiment thoughtfully, push back critically, and make the case that slow, humanistic thinking still matters” Artificial intelligence isn’t inherently good or bad. Like the printing press or the written word itself, AI is a force – and whether it enhances or undermines historical practice will depend on who uses it, how, and why. AI’s most obvious advantage is that it can process vast amounts of data much faster than your regular historian, which turns it into an incredible asset. The trick here is to use it as it was originally meant to be used – not to replace human interpretation but to identify patterns that humans might not notice and, thus, to enable us to come up with better, more nuanced questions. But it goes beyond that. AI is forcing historians to rethink what constitutes evidence, authorship and interpretation. In doing so, it is not just supporting existing historical methods, it’s helping evolve them. Though I am not worried that historians will be replaced by AI any time soon, there is a risk that indiscriminate use might flatten out the practice. Good history requires doubt, contradiction, ambivalence, even uncertainty, but AI models are designed to produce smooth answers even when the data is messy or the past is unknowable. Moreover, history isn’t just knowledge – it’s a method of knowing. If AI shortcuts the method, it threatens the discipline’s integrity. There is little doubt that AI will be part of historical research, but it is crucial that historians shape its use to enhance rather than undermine our craft. We should resist the urge to scale for scale’s sake, and instead use AI to deepen, not dilute, historical understanding. If we do that, and embed AI within the discipline’s values – critical thinking, reflexivity, contextual awareness – then historians will become central in answering the question of whether AI is good or bad for history. We must experiment thoughtfully, push back critically, and make the case that slow, humanistic thinking still matters, even in an age of rapid computation. I am confident that the tables will turn, and we’ll soon talk about the ways in which history is good for AI. Delfi Nieto-Isabel is a lecturer in medieval and digital history, and co-director of the Digital Lives Programme at Queen Mary University of London “The best results come when humans work alongside machine-generated intuitions” In his classic Foundation series, sci-fi author Isaac Asimov explored the idea of statistically based ‘psycho-history’, by which the future could be predicted through the mathematical analysis of data on the past and present. With the rise of generative AI, it may feel as if a dystopian version of Asimov’s future is edging towards reality, but there are grounds to be a little more positive. A great deal of what historians do is attempting to understand past societies by observing patterns in the evidence they left behind. Machines are spectacularly good at this, and the large language models of contemporary AI take this to a new level. To take an example from my own area of work, texts inscribed on stone in a variety of ancient languages survive from the Roman world in their hundreds of thousands. These are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. To make sense of them, both individually and en masse, as evidence for ancient societies and languages, historians need to compare these texts with one another. But to do so requires familiarity with them all, and the ability to find and compare parallels or identify patterns. Large language models specially trained on this material can now offer suggestions for missing words, dates and origins of this material, precisely because they see patterns across the material that a solitary human might find only after days or weeks of library work – or not at all. Read more | Be wary of technology’s big promises, but roll with the changes The crucial point, however, is that these are suggestions – and the models can offer multiple suggestions, ranked by probability and exposing some of the underlying reasoning. The best results come when humans work alongside machine-generated intuitions. Correlation is not the same as causation, and history is a fundamentally human ‘science’. Nuance, context and, above all, humanity is fundamental to understanding our past, present and future. If that is surrendered to a machine then all of it is lost, and we are no longer writing our own history. Every generation writes its own history, it’s said. Powerful AI can stimulate that process – but it certainly cannot write it for us. Jonathan Prag is professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford, and a co-author of the Aeneas AI model for contextualising ancient inscriptions (predictingthepast.com) “Fake ‘historical’ images and texts are already circulating and, with ever-greater sophistication, they will become harder to spot” Historians have been using AI for many years as an important tool for exploring and analysing the vast digitised and born-digital materials that increasingly constitute our primary sources. For instance, using AI it becomes possible to extract the names of all members of parliament mentioned in historical Hansard, identify the themes and topics on which they have spoken, and trace changes of emphasis over time. Handwritten text recognition technologies enable the accurate transcription of manuscript collections at scale. There are many other examples. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/EMBCXW-e6484e8-e1765189009771.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A line of light blue book spines with gold words on them, each with a year and volume number on them" title="Hansard, the official record of British parliamentary debates compiled by reporters is another vast repository of information that AI can help interrogate (Image by Alamy)" /> This has been unhelpfully elided by the use of ‘AI’ as synonymous with generative AI. Machine learning, however, has not captured the public imagination in the same way as GenAI, with its easy-to-use chatbot interfaces. The speed with which GenAI has become near-ubiquitous, allowing no time to consider all of the ramifications, seems bewildering. Familiar software packages and media platforms are increasingly cluttered with invitations to ask an AI assistant for help. The AI-generated is entangled with the human-created in ways that undoubtedly pose real difficulties for the integrity of the historical record. Fake ‘historical’ images and texts are already circulating and, with ever-greater sophistication, they will become harder to spot. This is a huge challenge, but it is also an opportunity for historians to apply their knowledge and expertise to a problem that requires particular critical skills. A 2025 study sponsored by Microsoft sought to identify those occupations most at risk from GenAI. Historians came second, behind interpreters and translators. Dredge operators, last on the list, can apparently be more confident about their future role. But historians can help navigate this new knowledge landscape. Insightful source criticism, deep understanding of context, awareness of archival absence and loss, and a commitment to centring the human experience in the technological are key elements of historical research and practice. Arguably, they have never been more useful. Jane Winters is professor of digital humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London “Reading is thinking. Writing is thinking. These core skills cannot be outsourced without losing something fundamental” We seek to understand ourselves by exploring our pasts – and AI will not change this fundamental urge. The digital revolution has already transformed the historian’s work considerably, without fundamentally altering our purpose. Much change has been positive. Barriers of geography, cost and materiality have collapsed, broadening access to history as never before. Less profitably, instant access and keyword searching deprive us of context, and we are less likely to understand the systems that sort, sift and deliver our sources. Always, we shape and are shaped by our tools in a relationship that must be carefully negotiated. Read more | Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare? Utopians and naysayers are united in their confidence that AI will change everything. We must recognise such predictions as products of a moment of frenzied development and investment. Once the hype has died down, historians will adapt – just as we did to that other over-hyped but transformational technology, the internet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1081366104-f6643cf-e1765189043171.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The Maughan Library, King’s College London: “Students learn that critical reading and precision writing are the essential tools for engaging with the complex human past,” says Chris Sparks (Image by Getty Images)" title="The Maughan Library, King’s College London: “Students learn that critical reading and precision writing are the essential tools for engaging with the complex human past,” says Chris Sparks (Image by Getty Images)" /> We will use AI where it can help us – to automate repetitive tasks, to ‘distantly read’ sources identifying areas for closer inspection, or to hone our prose. But we will remain wary of its dangers – not least its tendency to hide its sources and make things up. Hopefully, new tools will become available that reduce our dependence on centrally controlled systems, allowing more thoughtful, bespoke and informed use. We must think carefully about how we use AI in the classroom, too. Students learn that critical reading and precision writing are the essential tools for engaging with the complex human past. Reading is thinking. Writing is thinking. These core skills cannot be outsourced without losing something fundamental. They can be honed only with practice, and we must protect space for that in our teaching. Yet we cannot simply ignore AI, because we have begun to encounter its output routinely in our daily lives. History is a project, not a product. If AI ushers in an era of fast, cheap, mass-produced text, then the skills that history teaches will only become more valuable. Chris Sparks is a senior lecturer in digital history at Queen Mary University of London “AI offers the chance to explore archives at scale, ask new questions and uncover new patterns" There are plenty of anxieties about AI. This should not surprise us: in the past, new technologies such as the railway resulted in moral panics. Rather than a threat, AI can be used – just as other technologies have been. It is important to draw a distinction between functions sometimes described as ‘generative’ and ‘hermeneutic’. The former is what first comes to mind: it can be used to write text, including historical arguments. The latter is using AI to ‘distant read’ large bodies of texts, including archives. Much criticism levelled at AI tends to focus on generative AI – for example, teachers’ fears that students will ‘cheat’ on essays, simply entering the assigned title and word length as a prompt, then leaving AI to produce a passable composition within seconds. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-569178239-233888a-e1765189068133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A woman holds up an old passport in front of her face. On the left page there is a black and white photo of a young girl" title="A Jewish woman holds a copy of fake papers enabling her to flee the Netherlands after the Nazi invasion: AI helps researchers search huge archives of testimonies by Holocaust survivors (Image by Getty Images)" /> Where AI has greater value for historians is as a hermeneutic tool. It is helpful to remember a point that Todd Presner makes to scholars in his 2024 book Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory – that computers ‘read’ differently from humans, but neither better nor worse than us. The challenge facing historians is how to use this technology to ask new questions, particularly to interrogate vast archives that cannot be comprehensively searched through more traditional methods. One area in which I, and other interdisciplinary teams, have been experimenting is using digital methods to access stories of Holocaust survivors in oral history collections. These are typically too large for any one person to watch in their life. The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, for example, contains more than 55,000 interviews, each 2–3 hours long. Read more | "A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions": the future of history Rather than replacing close reading – or watching and listening – of these interviews, AI offers the chance to explore archives at scale, ask new questions and uncover new patterns that invite close reading. For example, what pronouns – I or we – do men and women use to tell what is variously a solo or shared story? Where and why do silences occur in oral history archives as the past becomes too hard to retell? Critical use offers opportunities to do history differently. Tim Cole is professor of social history at the University of Bristol “AI promises to make history faster, but also shallower” AI is often hailed as the next great tool for historians. It can scan entire archives in seconds, collate references across databases, and generate polished prose at the click of a button. On the surface, this seems like liberation from drudgery. But, in speeding up our work, AI also risks hollowing it out. History is not simply a matter of data extraction. The working historian does more than harvest facts: we interrogate silences in sources, wrestle with contradictions in established narratives, and read against the grain of the archive. AI machine tools excel at spotting patterns but fail at understanding nuance. They can tell you how often a phrase appears in a colonial newspaper, but not why irony mattered to the writer, nor how absence itself can be evidence. Outsourcing too much to algorithms risks confusing fluency with insight. The bigger danger, however, lies in how AI will shape the dissemination of history. Museums, publishers and even classrooms may come to rely on AI-generated summaries to teach the past. This could democratise access, but it could also flatten differences and sanitise conflict. History risks being repackaged into uniform, bite-sized ‘lessons’ optimised for clarity rather than complexity. That should alarm any historian who believes that the discipline’s value lies in argument and debate. AI will certainly change the rhythms of our work. It helps me, as a historian of modern subcontinental Buddhism, to map far-flung connections between texts in English, Hindi and Sinhalese. But if I do not remain critical, it is all too easy to mistake the machine’s quick outputs for deeper interpretation. And if the wider public comes to accept AI’s versions of the past as authoritative, the historian’s role as interpreter and critic could be diminished. The challenge for us is clear. AI will not replace historians, but it could deskill us if we let it. Indeed, it promises to make history faster, but also shallower. Our task is to ensure that the speed it offers does not come at the cost of depth – because history done fast is rarely history done well. Bhadrajee Hewage recently completed a DPhil in history from Trinity College Oxford, researching trends in subcontinental Buddhism during the late colonial and early postcolonial periods This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The US 'voodoo' scare: why 19th-century racists spread fake news about Haiti
From sexual orgies to Satan incarnated as a snake, lurid depictions of ‘voodoo’ in North America long titillated and shocked readers. As David G Cox explains, they were also wielded as justifications for racist oppression during the social and political upheavals of the 19th-century US
On 2 January 1893, the black American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture on Haiti to an audience in Chicago. It was widely alleged, he reflected, that the Caribbean republic was riddled with “voodooism, fetishism, serpent worship and cannibalism”, and that “little children are fatted for slaughter and offered as sacrifices to their voodoo deities”. Such claims, Douglass declared, were false. He told his listeners that, while serving as US minister (effectively, ambassador) to Haiti between 1889 and 1891, he found no evidence of ritual sacrifice, despite diligent investigation. By the time Douglass spoke in Chicago, the idea of Haitian ‘voodoo’ as a murderous cult was lodged in the American public consciousness. As he noted, the features of this myth would have been familiar to many. According to scores of white writers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘voodoo’ was an imported African religion devoted to the worship of Satan incarnated as a snake. ‘Voodoo’ ceremonies, it was claimed, consisted of frenzied dances, sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of animals or humans followed by the consumption of their bodies or blood. The priests and priestesses of this imaginary faith were said to be the real rulers of Haiti, holding all its citizens – from presidents to peasants – in the grip of terror. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-556636225webready-f31fffd-e1765183494712.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a black man dressed in a suit with a small bow tie. He has short hair and a thick moustache" title="Ebenezer Bassett denounced claims that the black-led Caribbean nation was a hotbed of ‘voodoo’ cannibalism and human sacrifice (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 1901, claims about Haitian ‘voodoo’ coalesced in a widely reprinted newspaper report on the “demoniacal orgies” of this purported “devil’s cult”. Supposedly reproducing the findings of the famous American geologist and traveller Robert Hill, the author of the piece claimed not only that “large numbers of young children are offered up annually in Haiti as sacrifices to the Great Yellow Snake” but also that “mothers frequently dedicate their infants at birth to this purpose”. The article provoked an incredulous response from Ebenezer Bassett who, as US minister to Haiti between 1869 and 1877, was the first black American diplomat. Having lived there for more than a decade, and speaking fluent French, Bassett – like Douglass – could claim authority on the question of Haitian religion. As Bassett knew, “the whole story about cannibalism in Haiti is no more than a myth which, like other myths, has gained credence by persistent repetition”. Casting doubt on the veracity of the report, he noted that Robert Hill had refuted the existence of Haitian cannibalism in his recent Caribbean travel narrative, and that the claims of the article were “in full accord with – it is better not to say that they are probably based upon – Sir Spenser St John’s book”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-152197629webready-4da9320-e1765183520674.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two stone figures, tied together by a metal chain around their necks" title="Chained bocio (protective figures) of the Vodun religion of the Fon people of southern Benin. The chains are symbolic both of slavery and of Gu, the vodu (spirit) of iron and war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Lurid inventions Spenser St John was a British diplomat and former chargé d’affaires in Haiti, and the book in question was Hayti, or, The Black Republic. First published in 1884, it made a deep impression on US journalism, providing the blueprint for a plethora of articles that, though claiming originality, did little more than summarise, in increasingly lurid terms, its lengthy chapter on “Vaudoux Worship and Cannibalism”. Up to this point, I have placed ‘voodoo’ in quotation marks, not only to suggest that it was a figment of white imaginations but also to differentiate it from Vodou, the African-derived religion genuinely practised by Haitians. Much of this religion can be traced to west and west-central Africa. It contains elements of the religions practised during the era of slavery by the Aja and Fon peoples of the Bight of Benin (vodu is the Fon word for spirit), as well as of others from the kingdom of Kongo. Read more | Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838 – but here's why he was still far from true freedom However, Vodou was not, as 19th-century white commentators claimed, a direct African import. It was a product of the New World melting pot – a dynamic blend of the religions of enslaved Africans and the Christianity of their European enslavers. In this respect, Vodou has much in common with other black diasporic religions including Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and Jamaican Obeah. Like those, Vodou helped people of African origin survive the brutality of Atlantic slavery. In the Victorian age, white people on both sides of the Atlantic ignored the vibrant realities of Vodou, dwelling instead on its demonic imagined double: ‘voodoo’. Why were they so keen to defame Haitian religion? Frederick Douglass had the answer. “Haiti is black,” he declared in Chicago, “and we [Americans] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved and free people of colour rose against the French colonial government of Saint-Domingue. The revolution resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence for the colony. Renamed Haiti, it became the world’s only black republic. Desperate to demonstrate that people of African descent were incapable of self-government, white supremacists spent the next century defaming Haiti, presenting it – in the words of Douglass – as a “very hell of horrors”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/webready-9c7ef73-e1765183675345.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" title="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" /> As the 20th century approached, the idea that the world could be divided into races whose members shared the same essential traits was widely accepted. Thus, to opponents of black freedom in the US, Haitian ‘voodoo’ became proof that, without white control, black Americans would degenerate to savagery. As Douglass reflected, the black American could “never part with his identity and race”, meaning that the denial of Haitian civilisation was a denial of the “possibilities of the negro race generally”. This backlash against black freedom explains why ‘voodoo’ first entered the American popular consciousness during the 1860s and 1870s, just as a series of constitutional amendments secured the abolition of slavery, along with the establishment of black citizenship and the enfranchisement of black men. As the author of an 1866 article in the Memphis Appeal proclaimed, ‘voodoo’ was “beginning to take hold among the negroes. Free them from the check which was once held over them, they have unlimited control over their baser passions, and now and then it bursts out, and proves that the worship of their barbaric fathers still runs in the blood of the Americanised negro.” Deluge of discourse Initially, Americans writing about ‘voodoo’ focused on Louisiana and, particularly, New Orleans. A former French colony, Louisiana had a sizeable French-speaking population well into the 19th century. In the 1790s and early 19th century, this population had been bolstered by the arrival of up to 25,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution, well over half of whom were enslaved. It is thus unsurprising that a reference to “an African deity called Vaudoo” appeared in a New Orleans newspaper as early as 1820. However, from the 1880s onwards, thanks to Spenser St John, attention turned to ‘voodoo’ in Haiti. The press was swiftly saturated with reports depicting the Caribbean republic as a “land of blood” – with articles bearing headlines such as: “Haiti, a Brooding Nightmare of Savagery, Bloodshed, Cannibalism”. It is tempting to see this deluge of discourse as a reflection of US imperial designs on Haiti, which it occupied between 1915 and 1934. However, at the turn of the 20th century, Haitian ‘voodoo’ was most often invoked by white-supremacist Democrats who argued that Jim Crow laws and regulations – which, enacted from the late 19th century, disenfranchised black Americans and enforced their segregation from white people – were necessary to prevent similar savagery at home. The peak of interest in Haitian ‘voodoo’ coincided with legal efforts to destroy the black vote in the South. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, and ending with Georgia in 1906, southern legislatures drew up new state constitutions containing a plethora of voting restrictions. These were intended to disenfranchise black Americans without contravening the 15th Amendment of 1870, which made it unconstitutional to deprive the vote on the basis of race. In the halls of Congress, Democrats, including the Mississippi senator Hernando Money, cited the work of St John as supposed proof that the black American was no more than a “veneered savage”. To the architects of Jim Crow, ‘voodoo’ was an ideological weapon. Depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ worship, a potent brew of sex and violence, helped to sell newspapers in an age of sensationalist journalism. At the same time, they reinforced racist notions that everybody of African descent was inherently bestial, criminal and hypersexual. Depictions of orgiastic worship chimed with the myth that white women were in constant danger of the black ‘beast rapist’, which was used to justify Jim Crow and fuel violence against black Americans. Read more | The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France In a 1914 speech to Congress, the notoriously racist Mississippi senator James Vardaman made the connection explicit. St John, he claimed, had presented a “disgusting story of the worship of the voodoo and cannibalism, which he says is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic”. Frequently portraying black worshippers as beasts and demons, the language used in depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ was dehumanising in the extreme. Written portrayals were sometimes accompanied by lurid illustrations, such as A Voodoo Sacrifice, published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1905. A depiction of child sacrifice, the illustration included a worshipper with grotesquely ape-like features as well as a reptilian figure fixing the newspaper reader with an accusatory gaze, suggesting that she or he was an unwelcome witness to secret black rites. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1426141403webready-352c952-e1765183778614.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a white man, wearing a white shirt and black cowboy hat, looking towards the right" title="Mississippi senator James Vardaman, who in 1914 told Congress that in Haiti “cannibalism… is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fears of black resistance While ostensibly justifying Jim Crow, American depictions of Haitian Vodou betrayed acute white fears of black resistance. African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices played a part in almost every slave uprising in North America and the Caribbean. In 1822, protective charms were allegedly distributed among those involved in South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey conspiracy, named after a free black man convicted of planning a major uprising of enslaved people. In Jamaica a little over 60 years earlier, the use of similar charms during the massive slave insurrection known as Tacky’s Revolt prompted a British crackdown on Obeah. For late 19th-century white Europeans and Americans, however, the dangerous character of black religion was most associated with the Haitian Revolution. By the end of the century, the idea had been enshrined in Haitian mythology that the revolution began with a Vodou ceremony in a forest named Bois-Caïman, during which a pig was sacrificed and a blood oath sworn. Though Vodou certainly galvanised the Haitian Revolution, the reality of the Bois-Caïman ceremony has been debated by scholars, some of whom question the sources upon which the story is based. White supremacists, however, had no interest in questions of historical accuracy, instead portraying Vodou as a death cult bent upon the annihilation of the white race. This accusation chimed with the widespread view that political equality in the US would lead to race war. In 1908, the San Antonio Light published what it claimed was a genuine Vodou chant invoking racial extermination, but which was almost certainly the product of a journalist’s fevered imagination. O-he! Papa Damba! Down with whites and with mulattoes! Burn them, shoot them, drown their women! Help your blacks, your poor black children Circulated by those seeking to justify Jim Crow, tales of ‘voodoo’ sacrifice and cannibalism were shot through with white anxiety. These sanguinary stories may have facilitated a kind of psychological displacement. In other words, real white violence against African Americans was projected as imaginary black murder in the service of Satan. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/AKG9430442webready-9ba2b82-e1765183804180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a group of people seated on the ground of a cemetery, with large black and red trees arching over the top of them" title="A Vodou scene in Haiti, by renowned artist Hector Hyppolite. Lurid reports in US newspapers of ‘voodoo’ ceremonies were cited as proof that white control was necessary to prevent black Americans from degenerating into savagery (Image by AKG)" /> In the turn-of-the-20th-century South, racial violence assumed unimaginable dimensions in the form of spectacle lynching: black Americans were tortured and murdered before white crowds that could number in the thousands. According to statistics compiled by the NAACP (the civil rights organisation founded in 1909 as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), at least 1,902 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1910. The affinities between these all-too-real rituals and fictional ‘voodoo’ ceremonies seem more than superficial, especially if we note – as many historians have – the religious symbolism and sacrificial dimensions of spectacle lynching. Read more | Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation This reign of racial terror troubled many white people, undermining their sense that they stood at the summit of human civilisation. Condemning the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert of Mississippi, one newspaper editor wrote that “[t]he negroes, in their most bestial state of voodooism, could be guilty of nothing more savage and brutal.” The editor’s conclusion deliberately inverted the racist language of Democratic politicians such as Hernando Money. “The white man is given to much boasting,” that journalist reflected, “but in many instances he is but a thinly veneered savage.” ‘Voodoo’ gripped the public imagination because, while fuelling the violence upon which Jim Crow was built, it allowed many white Americans to imagine that it was not themselves but others who lived in a “land of blood”. David G Cox is a lecturer in modern American history at the University of Southampton. His research for this article was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Hitler's war on words: how the Nazis used art to bolster their murderous regime
Hitler and his acolyte Joseph Goebbels wielded propaganda as a potent weapon in the battle for German hearts and minds. Lisa Pine shows how posters targeted all sectors of society to promote prejudice and bolster support for party policies
FAMILY PLANNING The Nazis considered nuclear families to be the building blocks of a ‘pure’ German nation The family was exalted in Nazi ideology and propaganda as “the germ cell of the nation”. In the Nazi Party platform, a 25-point programme outlining their political goals, it was declared that: “The state must ensure that the nation’s health standards are raised by protecting mothers and infants.” This 1936 poster shows the Nazi eagle spreading its wings protectively over the valuable German family. Echoing the eagle, the father of the family has his arms around his wife and one of his children; the mother holds a baby in her arms, while a third young child smiles out at the viewer. “The NSDAP protects the national community” is the headline slogan, with further wording proclaiming that “national comrades” could turn to their local NSDAP group for help or advice. The Nazi Party did indeed provide assistance and counsel to families – provided that they were deemed ‘pure’ German, hereditarily healthy, and of good blood and character. OWNING THE AIRWAVES Encouraging universal uptake of radios, the Nazis hijacked broadcast media for propaganda purposes Radio offered a convenient way of streaming propaganda and speeches directly into homes – so, unsurprisingly, the Nazis were keen to ensure that as many Germans as possible had their own radios. Hence the Volksempfänger (‘People’s Receiver’), a range of low-cost sets developed by the government from 1933. “All Germany listens to the Führer with the People’s Receiver,” proclaims this 1936 poster, one of several designed to encourage take-up. The implication was, of course, that every proud citizen would be expected to buy a set and tune in to listen to Hitler. And the effort succeeded: by 1939, 70 per cent of German households owned a radio, creating a mass audience for the regime’s output. In 1933 alone, Hitler made at least 50 radio broadcasts. Communal listening was also encouraged, to heighten the emotional impact of speeches, with loudspeakers set up in town squares and other public areas for this purpose. Read more | The rise of the Nazis and the importance of heeding warnings DRIVING FORCE A scheme designed to boost car ownership reflected the regime’s plan to motorise Germany The Nazis were determined that Germany should be a nation of motorists as a signifier of the regime’s modernity, speed and progress. From August 1938, workers were encouraged to save for a Volkswagen (‘People’s Car’) via the government-backed Kraft durch Freude (KdF; Strength through Joy) organisation. To make car ownership accessible to all Germans, not just the wealthy elites who were previously able to afford one, the KdF-Wagen scheme involved paying instalments of 5 Reichsmarks each week for four and a half years. Posters such as this 1938 example, showing a black Volkswagen with a voucher card, were produced to promote the scheme. By 1939, some 270,000 people had signed up. The Volkswagen was intended as “a car for free time and leisure” – no longer largely the preserve of the business sector but a desirable, useful and enjoyable consumer product. However, the outbreak of war in 1939 choked the output of KdF cars, as the economy was diverted to support armament production and factories were dedicated to turning out military vehicles. FEMALE GAZE Posters played on the fears of economically deprived women during the Depression At the height of the economic crisis in Germany, in 1932 some 6 million people were unemployed across the country, leading to widespread poverty. The Nazis played on the hardships suffered by so much of the population, using posters to declare that only Hitler and his party could lift the country – and its citizens and their families – out of the deprivation that afflicted so many. To maximise the impact, campaigns were cannily targeted, using images, language and themes to appeal to specific groups .This example, aimed at women, proclaims: “Frauen! Denkt an Eure Kinder!” (“Women! Think of your children!”). The picture shows a young family – a dejected, unemployed father, an anxious mother and two small children – with the clear message to “save the German family”. The suggestion being that voting for Hitler was the best way to secure a brighter future for the nation’s children. Read more | “I hope I would have defended the Nazis at Nuremberg” FIGHTING TALK Posters were deployed to boost public morale during wartime In this “Ein Kampf, Ein Sieg!” (“One Struggle, One Victory!”) poster designed by Hans Schweitzer in 1943, a brown-shirted member of the Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers, the paramilitary force that played a key role in Hitler’s rise to power) joins a Wehrmacht solder in stretching his right arm in a Hitler salute beside swastika flags. The dates at the top, 30 January 1933–1943, imply that the war was simply an extension of Hitler’s continued efforts, right from the moment he took power, to make Germany great and to defeat its enemies. This evokes the sense of a continued battle from the early days of Nazi political success to projected victory in the war. This strikingly martial and belligerent poster was intended to bolster endurance among the German people by reinforcing the prowess, fortitude and ideological determination of German soldiers. It was one of many designed to boost morale and dictate the public narrative about the progress of the war. ANTISEMITIC ART Nazi posters painted Jews as the root of Germany’s economic and political problems In Nazi propaganda, the Jew was frequently used as a scapegoat for all that had gone wrong in Germany. In his writings and speeches, Hitler repeatedly blamed the Jews for both the disaster of the First World War and the outbreak of the Second. Using lurid colours to highlight the alarming nature of the Jewish ‘enemy’, antisemitic posters appeared on the streets of Germany and across Nazi-occupied territories to try to influence the public as they went about their daily activities. This 1943 example by Hans Schweitzer epitomises the themes and style. It features a caricature of the ‘capitalist’ Jew, presented as hook-nosed, fat and repellent in his black hat and suit, wearing a yellow Star of David bearing the word “Jude” (“Jew”). The text makes no bones about the perceived culpability of the Jews. “Der ist schuld am Kriege!” (“He is responsible for the war!”), it shouts, the word “Der” (“He”) presented in a much larger font size to emphasise who’s to blame for the conflict. Read more | Did Hitler have a secret Jewish grandfather? Our DNA research has solved the mystery AMIABLE OCCUPATION The Nazis attempted to pacify the civilian inhabitants of the countries they invaded The Nazi regime was keen to extol the benefits of occupation to the populations of some lands its troops invaded. For example, in this positively cheerful poster from 1940 by Theo Matejko, aimed at civilians in occupied France, a German soldier is shown holding a smiling French child munching a piece of bread, with two more French youngsters gazing hopefully up at him. The caption, in red and black lettering, reads: “Populations abandonnées, faites confiance au soldat allemand!” (“Abandoned populations, place your trust in the German soldier!”). Such calculated propaganda, offering reassurances about the occupying forces, belied the truth of their aims. This gentle image of a German soldier was very different from those portrayed on propaganda posters distributed in Germany – such as the one shown on the opposite page – which showed the Wehrmacht as ruthlessly determined in the face of its enemies. Slogans intended for a German audience were powerful and memorable: “Life or Death”, “For Freedom and Life”, “Perish Judah”, “Victory at any Price”. Lisa Pine is a fellow of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. Her most recent book (co-authored with Kees Boterbloem) is Soviet and Nazi Posters: Propaganda and Policies (Bloomsbury, 2025)